This video is Brough Turner at the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks 2010 in Vienna. I truly admire the way this man thinks. To be plain, anyone who works from a home office professionally should not be without redundant…
When last we left our intrepid hero he had suffered nine months of unreliable Wifi wound the home and home office. After trying a major brand name SMB class 802.11N type, which was utterly disappointing. At the end of part 4 in our saga we had just completed the installation of a pair of Open Mesh OM-1P 802.11G type MESH APs. Beyond that the entire project went quiet.
In this case that long quiet stretch is “a good thing*.” The OM-1Ps were in service for over a year. I had one in the house in the forward portion of the property and a second in the office at the rear. Two were required to provide adequate coverage.
The OM-1Ps were not perfect. They were only 802.11B/G, so lacking some of the features of newer N-type APs. Also, they didn’t support WPA2 encryption, which would have been my preference. Still, they worked well enough that I left them in service.
After about eight months the OM-1P in the house started to become unreliable. After resetting it a few times I simply powered it down permanently. That meant that wifi coverage on the front porch was sketchy to unusable.
When last we left this story our protagonist had returned the Cisco AP to BUY.COM leaving le maison du Graves without functional wifi for about two weeks. Fortunately I was out of town a lot during that period so it wasn’t much of an inconvenience. If anything it gave me some time to evaluate my options regarding replacement gear.
I’ve noted that whereas I had a lot of problems with 802.11n type wifi APs I’d previously had far fewer issues with 802.11g type hardware. Very recently I was reminded by someone who should know that 802.11a/b/g is more mature hardware than 802.11n. This certainly rings true as my very old Linksys WAP-54G ran for literally years with no problems at all.
How I long for the Linksys of old.