Check out Rich Tehrani's blog entry from yesterday about Popular Telephony announcing Commoca and Texas Instruments agreement to embed Peerio in color IP Telephony terminals. The news was made to coincide with the "opening day" of Internet Telephony Expo. I can't wait to see Popular Telephony's product live in action on the exhibit floor!
I would have blogged Popular Telephony's news yesterday, but I was too busy trying to get these damn Linksys WRE54G wireless expanders/extenders to work so I could extend the WiFi range at Internet Telephony Expo. Yes, in addition to VoIP blogging, writing TMC Labs reviews, and managing TMC's computers, I along withVahid Hashemian are responsible for configuring the show's WiFi network. So you know who to complain to if WiFi doesn't work. Maybe I shouldn't have admitted to being the WiFi guru? Ahh too late now. Cat's outta the bag.
You would figure Linksys (now Cisco) would be a plug and play affair - after all, Linksys targets the home consumer.
Well, let me tell ya, it was anything but plug and play. The WRE54G has two LEDs that are both supposed to be blue (though nothing in the manual tells you this, an exhibitor said he has one at home and it's supposed to be all blue). The units we had had installed had one blue light and one red light each. After some tinkering, Vahid and I got it to work, but still we had 1 red light and 1 blue light. I then upgraded the firmware on the WRE54G and finally was able to get both lights to be blue, but only on the unit closest to the access point.
Unfortunately, we were only able to use 1 extender. We thought maybe we could place an extender every 30 feet and it would amplify the 2.4Ghz radio frequency, but alas, we couldn't get more than 1 extender to work. Looks like unlike cellular phones which can "hop" from tower to tower as you drive, these extenders don't work like that. As far as we could tell, only 1 extender can communicate with the main access point (AP).
Fortunately, we have multiple APs, so we'll just wire up the weak spots where needed.
Popular Telephony and Linksys WRE54G WiFi Extenders
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Erm, designing a wifi network for more then 50 people and several base stations is never a plug and play affair.
You need to do some architect planning of where the base stations are, the distance between them, making sure you have more where there are more crowd, and also planning the spectrum channel usage so there are low overlap.
Yep, did all that. Used Netstumbler to find other access points and changed the default channel from 6 to 8 - the least crowded channel.
I was able to get the Extender to work only after upgrading the firmware and moving it 10 feet closer to the AP. When it was 10 feet further, it lost about 10% of all packets.
Unfortunately, it still only supports 1 Extender per AP. Would be nice if it could handle multiple.
You may use more than one extender, if you would go to the admin page 192.168.1.240 for EVERY extender, change the ip address for each one so that they will communicate with each other go back to the AP. ex: 1st WE would read 192.168.1.240 the second 192.168.1.241 and so on. It should word fine. I have had no problems