.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Wirelessly connect to your Xbox using the Linksys WET11 Wireless Ethernet Bridge
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY In this interesting article, our own David Gewirtz reviews the Linksys WET11 Wireless Ethernet Bridge. He also clearly explains where this device fits into your network and why it might be useful to you–especially if you’re trying to wirelessly connect your Xbox or TiVo to the rest of your network.
In this article, I’m going to review the Linksys WET11 Wireless Ethernet Bridge, shown in Figure A. But before I do, it might be valuable for you to understand where this device fits into your network and why it might be useful to you–especially if you’re trying to wirelessly connect your Xbox or TiVo to the rest of your network.
.FIGPAIR A Linksys’ WET11 is small, handy, and pricey.
.H1 A brief overview of wireless networking
Many of you, like me, have already hooked up some form of WiFi wireless network (also known as 802.11). If you’ve done any network setup at all, you’ve heard terms like hubs, switches, and routers. We don’t have space in this article to go into these terms in depth, but briefly, hubs and switches connect a bunch of computers like the hub and spokes of a wagon wheel.
When you’re hooking things up, most consumer hubs and switches are indistinguishable–except that switches move traffic more efficiently, especially on large networks or with lots of traffic. A router, by definition, routes network traffic according to a set of rules. In the home networking world, that’s usually between a broadband feed coming from outside the home and your computer. Most consumer routers are combined with a four-port switch, and with these, you get the ability to connect a bunch of computers together inside your home, and then route traffic out and back on your broadband connection.
The next step in this process is what’s commonly called a WAP (Wireless Access Point). The typical consumer WAP is a small box with a four-port switch, a router for connecting to your broadband feed, and a WiFi transciever that lets you travel the Internet without wires. I like to do so from my couch, my porch, and in the morning from bed when I check the weather on my 802.11b-equipped Jornada Pocket PC.
.H1 Connecting your Xbox to the wireless network
So now, on one side of the house, you’ve got a few computers hard-wired into your WAP. You’re surfing from the living room on your laptop. Down in the family room, you’d like to connect your Xbox (which has an Ethernet jack) to Xbox Live, the game console’s multi-player broadband network.
Easy, right? Well, not really.
.BREAK_EMAIL Click here to read the rest of this article and learn how to connect your Xbox to the ‘net.
You could run a 40-foot CAT-5 cable (Category 5 Ethernet cable) from the back of the Xbox downstairs up to the WAP router upstairs. But, wait. Why would you do that if you have a WiFi network? Why not just plug in a WiFi card into the Xbox?
Uh, well, you can’t. Despite it seeming like the Xbox is a regular PC in drag, there’s no bus inside the Xbox for you to plug in a card. And you can’t stick a PC Card in, like you might in your laptop, again because there’s no slot for that purpose. Somehow, you’ve got to run a wire from your Xbox to … something.
At this point, you technically have two choices. In theory, you could buy another WAP and use it near your Xbox, and have one WAP talk to the other WAP. Unfortunately, while most WAPs will do this, they have an interesting limitation: they’ll either connect to the outside world and route traffic or connect to another WAP like a bridge. But not both.
The real solution is a Wireless Ethernet Bridge, such as the Linksys WET11. As you can see in Figure B (which I swiped right off Linksys’ Web site), the WET11 bridge connects over an Ethernet cable to another device. Linksys is showing it connect to another hub. This means you can run another wired network near your Xbox, perhaps hooking in your TiVo and another PC. Alternatively, you can connect the WET11 directly to your Xbox or other remote PC.
.FIGPAIR B Linksys provides a good overview of how various network devices work together.
.H1 How well does it work?
Overall, the WET11 worked quite well. My WAP is about 35 feet away (on the same floor) from the WET11. I found that virtually all file transfers and other connections were transmitted successfully between my wired network and the Xbox, going through the bridge. The only time I had difficulty (and actually ran a long cable for the evening) was when I was trying to transfer an entire 2.4GB Linux distribution to my Xbox’ 200GB hard drive. Yeah, it’s hacked. Maybe someday I’ll tell you more about that.
There are two negatives that have to be discussed about the WET11. First, it’s pretty expensive. Best Buy sells it for $129, and the best price I found on PriceWatch was $103.89 (although there was a similar D-Link device listed on PriceWatch for $80). While there’s a lot of tech going on inside this device, it’s actually $30 more expensive than a complete Linksys WAP11 Wireless Access Point (and that’s got four ports, a switch, and a router built in). We have to take points off our rating of this device because of price.
The second negative is that the documentation is adequate, not great. I had one hurdle to overcome that took me quite a while to figure out. It turns out the device needs its own IP address. It can get that IP address from DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), from the WAP, or you have to set it up ahead of time. The way you accomplish this is first hook the bridge to your PC, use the included utility to talk to the bridge, and pre-assign it an IP. Then unhook the bridge (and hook yourself back onto your home network) and plug the bridge into your Xbox.
Here’s the place I got stuck for a while: your Xbox and the bridge need two separate IPs. They are both nodes on the network. While it might have been obvious to some folks, nowhere did the docs say your devices had to have different IPs. Yes, now that I’m writing this, it seems somewhat clear, but it was definitely not when I was hooking it up.
.BEGIN_KEEP
Since I hooked everything up, the network has been running without a glitch. I can recommend this product to anyone who wants to bridge their consumer devices to their wireless network — as long as you’re willing to spend a little too much to do so.
.RATING 3
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on the Linksys WET11 Wireless Ethernet Bridge, visit http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?prid=432.
For more information on PriceWatch, visit http://www.pricewatch.com.
.H1 Easy, flexible article reprints
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.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO David Gewirtz is Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of ZATZ Publishing and is the author of The Flexible Enterprise. He can be reached at david@ZATZ.com. If you want to know more about David and see his artwork, you can visit David Gewirtz Unplugged at http://www.gewirtz.com, his personal Web site and paean to all things David.
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