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Change your Wireless routers channel
You have only 3 nonoverlapping channels at your disposal:
channels 1, 6,
and 11. If you and your neighbor both have a wireless network,
both of
which are set to channel 6, you may experience interference. You
can
remedy the problem by resetting your wireless router to a different,
preferably nonoverlapping, channel, in this case, either 1 or
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Replace your cordless phone.
Cordless phones are among the worst sources of interference for
wireless networks. They tend to transmit at a higher power
output than
Wi-Fi gear, making them louder and therefore harder to talk
over,
and they tend to transmit frequently, especially when the
handset and base station are separated. Some 2.4GHz cordless
phones let you select a
channel, in which case you can try separating the
phone's frequency
from the frequency of your wireless network.
For example, set your phone to channel 1 and your wireless
router to
channel 11. If your phone doesn't let you select a channel, try
putting
some distance between your phone and your router. Generally,
it's not
a good idea to place a cordless phone next to a Wi-Fi router.
If this doesn't help, consider replacing your 2.4GHz phone
with
a 5GHz phone.
This way, your phone and network won't be sharing the same
airspace and won't interfere with each other.
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Expand your wireless network.
The farther you are from your wireless router, the greater
the potential for interference to block or to slow your
connection. For example, you may
be able to connect just fine in your house, but on your patio,
you may have
an intermittent connection that disappears whenever your neighbor is
using her cordless phone. The signal on your patio may be too weak to
cope with the interference coming from the house next door.
You can strengthen the connection with antennas or repeaters
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Email or call me and I can help you with your wireless
problems! |
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Use encryption to protect your wireless network.
It sounds trivial, but consider this: wireless
data is transmitted over the air. This makes it far more exposed
than data transmitted over a cable.
To hack into an Ethernet network, you either need to force entry
through an Ethernet connection or you need access to the
Ethernet cable, which
you can lock behind a door; but to pry into a wireless network,
you need only be within range. A would-be intruder can park in
the street where
you live and do her dirty work from the privacy of her car,
without risking the unpleasantries of breaking and entering.
You can protect your wireless network by encrypting it.
Virtually all Wi-Fi gear supports an encryption scheme called
WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy).
WEP scrambles data transmitted over your network, making it
difficult to decipher. Even better, setting up WEP is easy. In
most cases, you merely
enter a passphrase into the configuration settings of each device on your
network. The devices use the passphrase to generate a WEP key,
which is used to encrypt and decrypt data transmitted over the
network.
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Lock down your LAN.
An always-on broadband connection is convenient, but it's
also a magnet for hackers and script kiddies, giving them a
target that is open 24/7.
You can use a firewall to thwart attacks on your network that
use your Internet connection as their point of entry. Most
wireless routers come with an
integrated NAT firewall. NAT stands for network address translation
and is used to hide the IP addresses of the PCs on your network
behind your
router's IP address. From the Internet, your network appears to consist of
only one device, your router. This makes it more difficult for
intruders to
identify the computers on your network. NAT, however, is
relatively dumb. It maps the addresses of the computers on your
network to the IP address
of the router, but it doesn't inspect the data inside the
packets passing through your router. For that, you need a second
firewall that performs
stateful packet inspection, or SPI. An SPI firewall can
determine if an incoming data packet is a legitimate response to
a request from one of
your computers. Not all routers include an SPI firewall, so keep
a lookout for it when you buy your gear.
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