Unplugged and Unwired: Wireless Networking with Windows XP
Published: June 11, 2001
By Barb Bowman, Windows XP Expert Zone Community Columnist
Editor's Note: Past articles by members of the online community are archived for your use. The information may become outdated as technology changes. For the most current information, please search the Web site or post a question in the newsgroups.
As much as I like to experiment with new hardware and software, I am certain that much of this fiddling and tweaking is based on need rather than desire. Given a choice between spending a Saturday morning fighting to install drivers to get some new device on my network running, or capturing sunrises over the lake with my digital camera, there's no contest. A pretty spring dawn wins every time.
Effortless, out-of-the-box wireless networking is one of the real gems of Windows XP. When friends visit me later this year with Windows XP Professional or Home Edition installed on their laptops, I won't skip a beat to add their machines to my home network while they visit. I'll just hand them one of my Orinoco or 3Com 802.11b PCMCIA cards and in less than 20 seconds, they'll be retrieving their e-mail and surfing the Web. Plug in the card, have a sip of coffee and you're online. It was never this easy! The road to where we are today was long and winding.
In the Beginning
My condo once had Ethernet cable everywhere, along the baseboards, wrapped around banisters and stapled along door frames. Because I'm a connectivity anywhere type of person and like reading my e-mail in the living room while having morning coffee, I'd drag a 150 foot cable over the sofa and plug in my laptop. Not pretty, but it served my purposes.
 | Effortless, out-of-the-box wireless networking is one of the real gems of Windows XP. |  | |
| |
|
Cutting the First Cords
In early 1999, just about when I was ready to ask for price quotes from local electricians to do some wall fishing with CAT 5 Ethernet cable, I got some proprietary 2 Mbps wireless gear for testing and evaluation. Installation involved a proprietary setup program and entering a string of numbers and letters in order to communicate between the client PCMCIA card and the access point.
While this freed me from cabling, transfers across my home LAN (local area network) were painfully slow when compared to hard wired 10/100Ethernet. If I were lucky enough in my travels to find someone with the same proprietary hardware, I'd have to manually enter a different string of letters and numbers, or use a utility to switch between network configurations, and then reboot.
An Interoperable Standard Emerges
Now we have the wireless technology known as 802.11b, an 11Mbps (megabits per second) wireless standard, and the first wireless access points and client PC cards. The first PCMCIA cards I used, on Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 98 SE, and later on Windows Me computers, required fiddling with configuration property tabs, frequent downloads of driver updates, and a lot of care and feeding when switching between access points. And there still were the annoying reboots each time I changed the SSID on all but my Windows 2000 computer.
I eventually figured out that if I set the Station ID name (SSID) to "any" or left it totally blank in the PC card connection configuration property sheet, I could usually connect to other wireless 802.11b networks during my travels. It wasn't a mainstream practice (or even widely known) that this configuration worked and not all PC card configuration applets supported leaving the station name blank.
Connectivity Everywhere
Now, 802.11b wireless networking is poised to begin its journey from the business enterprise to the residential space, and the first 802.11b products for home and small home office users have emerged. Between the fall of 2000 and the spring of 2001, an explosion of 802.11b wireless hardware for residential and small home office markets resulted in entire aisles in consumer technology stores being devoted to wireless gear. Today, the cost of a wireless 802.11b PCMCIA cards is often under $100 and wireless access points can be found at $200 and up. If you're a desktop user, you can buy an internal PCI version or USB external adapter from several vendors. Price is no longer a reason to choose cable.
No Fuss, No Mess, No Intervention Needed
The exciting news is that you no longer have to be a trained IT technician (or residential rocket scientist) to configure many of these 802.11b wireless adapters because Windows XP has out-of-the-box support for several major vendors (with many others planning to release Windows XP drivers in the near future).
It's called zero configuration, and it's an integral part of Windows XP networking. Recently, I replaced a hard drive on an IBM ThinkPad and clean installed a developmental version of Windows XP Professional. I inserted an Orinoco 802.11b Silver card in one of the slots, and booted from the Windows XP Professional CD. As Windows XP Professional finished installing TCP/IP networking, the two LEDs on the card indicated a solid working connection. I opened Internet Explorer and I was already connected, online and ready to surf. Windows XP automatically found the nearest (encryption disabled) access point without my intervention.
If you subsequently install a card, such as the Orinoco Silver card or 3Com Air Connect card after completing the initial installation of Windows XP, the same automatic wireless configuration is performed. Unless you are using encryption, there's really no need to even look at the properties of the connection, because Windows XP does it all automatically.
A Closer Look
On the day I installed Windows XP Professional on my ThinkPad, I had four access points connected to my home office LAN. All were automatically recognized and added to the visible networks list. If I lost connection with one (or unplugged it as a test) an automatic connection was established with the next visible access point.
A Little Traveling Music, Please
Places like Starbucks coffee shops are just beginning to install 802.11b access, and a few major hotel chains and major airports offer 802.11b wireless access. But, I don't count on it when I travel. Since most hotels I visit now have Ethernet data ports, I've improvised a "bring your own wireless access" solution. I travel with an IBM ThinkPad, a couple of wireless cards and a small, easy to pack Netblaster II 802.11b wireless access point (a wireless bridge) from Sohoware. I can plug the access point into a hotel data port and sit in a comfortable location while checking my e-mail.
Laptop and Access Point to Go
When I have visited places with wireless access points, I just power up my laptop and I'm immediately connected. (Note: there are some wireless access points sold to the business enterprise market that are closed to unauthenticated clients. These don't appear in the list of visible networks and you'll need to add them manually as a preferred network).
Windows XP is all about making technology work in the background. And making a complex, leading edge network protocol work with ease. Consider unplugging—and experience the magic for yourself.
Barb Bowman enjoys sharing her own experiences and insights into today's leading edge technologies. She is a product development manager for AT&T Broadband Internet Services, but her views here are strictly personal.
