No Wires Holding Me

When I think Internet, I think wireless Internet. Unfortunately, the phone companies have co-opted this word, and use it to mean mobile phones, which they call cell phones, which use wireless technology.

But I think of using wireless Internet. I've used wireless for, oh, maybe 5 years now? I moved in with a buddy, J.J., and he set it up. Then, I moved to Geekhouse, and they already had it set up. They had wireless when I was teaching too.

Let me tell you, it's nice. With the mobility of laptops, you want to be wireless. With the lack of mobility of desktops, wireless is an option you can forgo, though even there it can be nice.

The problem with wireless is: it's wireless.

If I don't need a wire to get connected, than anyone with a wireless card can get connected too.

Indeed, many people who set up a wireless router often fail to set up any security with it, because, surprise, surprise: it ain't easy to do!

I got Internet from Verizon for two reasons. First, it's a little cheaper than Comcast, even if Comcast has better bandwidth. Second, I've used it before, and been fairly happy with it.

Verizon supplied me first with a wireless adapter, which is a DSL modem plus a wireless router in one. Convenient.

Except, I had already bought a wireless router and wanted to use that. So I put in for a DSL modem, so I could use my router.

Except, you would think, setting this up would be easy as plugging in the DSL modem to the wireless router.

And it's almost that easy, except it isn't.

First, I called Verizon and asked them how to configure the Linksys router. I know. It's not entirely fair I do this, but there are some parts of the router that require some information from the ISP.

Strike one.

Already, this makes things complex. Linksys lists five different configurations you may have with your provider. They suggest you talk to the ISP to find out which. That's bad. I shouldn't have to know that at all.

I called Verizon, and they said I had PPPoE, or some such. They gave me my user name and password. That didn't seem to do the trick. Still, they were helpful.

I called Linksys. They were pretty helpful too. They sat with me for 30 minutes as we eventually figured out that I couldn't even get to the Internet on my wired connection. That is, connecting my laptop via Ethernet to the router, which itself was connected via Ethernet to the DSL modem, which was connected by a phone line to the phone jack.

That didn't work.

Eventually, the woman helping me figured out that the problem was that the Westell modem I had used the same IP address as the wireless router. Seems like all wireless router type devices use the same IP, which I don't recall off the top of my head. So, she had me configure the router so that it had a different IP. Once that was happy, the two components weren't conflicting with one another, and I was able to bot get to the Internet on a wired connection, as well as wirelessly.

Oh yes, when I talked to Verizon, they told me that I needed to set the DSL modem up as a "bridge" whatever that means (I should read some networking book for dummies). Didn't have to do that at all. (Strike two--shouldn't require a different mode).

And then, it wasn't necessary to set up PPPoE (I used some automatic DHCP, which is the default configuration). Note: the manuals suck in this respect. They could have said something like "If you use Verizon, you can just use the default setting, but you'd want to use the others if...). But again, they fail to explain this.

Ideally, they would explain why I need half a dozen options on everything, then how to go about finding the answers, and especially, how to find it for my setup. Ideally, I shouldn't have to do any of this!

In a perfect world, I attach the DSL modem to a router, and it just works!

Honestly, that's what they should all strive for. Certainly, if you had a wireless adapter, that would likely be what you'd want, right?

OK, so there should be one additional step. Once it simply "works", you should be able to configure the name of your router and pick a password.

Of course, I have five different options for this too. I have WEP, which I have to say, is painful. Then, there were four variations of PSK, two personal, two enterprise.

WEP goes through a phase where you pick a password, then it generates keys, then you type in the keys to get connected. Except these keys read like gibberish, so I can't properly remember them, and furthermore, the more secure one requires 26 of these hex values. It's maddening.

And I didn't have to do that before. Before, I typed in a normal password, and that was that!

Turns out there are two forms of entering passwords: WEP, the annoying (and I'm told insecure) way, and WPA, which of course, linksys doesn't even write in their manuals. Only when you hunt up the webpages, do you discover that the PSK options listed are really short for WPA-PSK. There's PSK and PSK2, which most people say is just WPA and WPA2.

Anyway, I set it up for one of these, entered in the password that I could remember, turned off wireless on my Mac, set it back up, punched in my password, and voila, back to being connected.

Now, I have a vague sense that I may not have set it up optimally. Certainly, like any piece of technological literature, the Linksys documentation doesn't tell you why there are so many different options, nor does it try to explain how to decipher it, nor take you down a likely path. And honestly, they should work with places like Verizon to come up with a plug-n-play option.

The one, somewhat-cool thing? Configuration on the router is done by connecting via Ethernet to the wireless router itself, then opening up the browser to a particular IP address, and then configuring it via web page manipulations. It's crude, but kinda clever, given that the average person doesn't necessarily want to open up a console to talk to the router, and type in commands that way.

Anyway, that took maybe an hour to an hour and a half of effort, and really, both Verizon, and especially Linksys were really quite helpful.

And to be honest, I was quite happy that it was all set up. This is the one kind of weird expense that the next generation of folks are finding it hard to live without. Oddly enough, they're willing to sacrifice the "must-have" technology that most people still crave: cable (or satellite) TV.