Answer:
1. Wired networks may give the appearance of a busy office full of the latest equipment, but in reality, wires can be an inefficient networking medium. They can limit signal strength as well as make it more difficult to expand and reorganize your network configuration. Wireless networking is a viable and affordable alternative that offers the benefits of making your environment more flexible. A wireless infrastructure allows you to effortlessly reconfigure your office space as your company grows and changes, easily extend connectivity and also allows employees to be mobile more easily.
2. Review the advantages and consider the benefits to your organization:
Reduced cost of installation. It may be significantly less expensive to install wireless access points compared to wiring your office with Ethernet capabilities.
Flexibility. If you regularly expand or reorganize your office space, or need to accommodate a variety of network configurations, the rapid transition time from one configuration to another that wireless provides can help reduce your network downtime. In addition, you won't have to incur the costs associated with physically rewiring office space.
Convenient information access. With wireless, you'd have the ability to extend access to key information to anyone on your staff, from anywhere in the office, even when they aren't physically connected to your wired local area network (LAN) connection. Do members of your staff regularly work away from their desks or stations, but could benefit from anytime, anywhere access to important data? Could you improve productivity by increasing access to important company systems? Do you have business processes you could streamline by reducing the number of times employees have to go back to their wired connections? Wireless LANs are the way to go, especially where there's no existing wired network. This is especially true in leased offices, where you can't go knocking holes in walls.
Your next step is to actually build a wireless LAN, which you'll do just like this:
Identify the equipment you want to buy, such as wireless notebooks, access points, wireless LAN adapters and wireless cards.
Determine the number of users who need to have access to the network. This will help you determine the number of access points you'll need.
Plan for the connection to your wired LAN, probably in a central location and in an open environment. Your goal is to maximize the access point's wireless range. The quoted range is a maximum of 300 feet, but that's very dependent on the existing environment--walls, water pipes, cables and so on all could decrease the range. The best thing to do is complete a site survey first; if that's not possible, assume a maximum range of 150 feet, as 300 could decrease throughput.
