Our house is new (2006), which provides us many contemporary living conveniences that an older home would likely not (e.g. an open floor plan and Great room, office/music room, walk-in pantry, etc) All the rooms are wired for phone and coaxial, but were not wired with Cat6 for computers and data transfer. This is a bummer because:
- I would use Cat6 runs. It would be a great convenience when networking our computers, gaming consoles, IP phones and, eventually when IPv6 becomes more and more prevalent (way, way down the road), our TVs, refrigerators, thermostats, and toasters.
- It can be a difficult, messy, and time consuming task to rewire all the rooms once they’re finished– impossible in some cases.
Until now my computers, servers and printer device were all located in my office. This made the physical network a breeze– a simple wireless router provided enough data ports for computers and servers, and wireless access for my laptop and wifi printer.
Xbox 360 enters stage left
Then, for Christmas, we got an Xbox 360(yes!). There were two main drivers for this:
Rock Band. Its the greatest multi-player game created to date. My 3 year old pretends to play the drums, my wife sings, our 6 year old plays the guitar (amazingly well), and I play bass. We all rock. I think Radiohead’s Creep is our favorite song.- We wanted to a user-friendly solution to get our mp3s from our computer to the home stereo.
Not only can we drop it like its hot with Rock Band, the Xbox 360 can act as a Windows Media Center Extender. This essentially means that it can act as a front-end for the WMC server on our Vista Premium computer. (Yes, I was skeptical of how well this would work. I am now a believer. Its great.)
The Xbox 360 can connect to our network via Ethernet or wireless connection. However, I’m not wired for Ethernet, and the Wifi adapter for the Xbox is an additional $100. (100 calms for a wifi antenna? Um, no.)
Solution: Build a wireless bridge from the entertainment center to the existing wireless router.
Cost: $45
I used a $45 Linksys WRT54G wireless router (I use this workhorse for home and business clients all the time because of its GPLed firmware and subsequent rich 3rd party firmware development). The Xbox will connect to this WRT54G via Ethernet– I’ll then tell the WRT54G to connect to my existing wireless network in such a way that it will become a wireless bridge.
A wireless bridge is nothing more than a way to connect two or more physically separated network segments. Businesses and campuses often use this type of technology as a cost effective way to interconnect their various building’s networks.
The router’s factory Linksys firmware will not allow you to create a wireless bridge, but the third party firmware, dd-wrt, will.
A quick firmware flash and simple dd-wrt configuration got everything ready for deployment. I placed the new router with the Xbox, connected the Xbox to router, powered them up and, like magic, the Xbox was on-line and streaming music.
My wife was happy.
Is this a permanent solution? Perhaps. Sure, I’d rather have Gigabit Ethernet running the entire length of the network, but, for now, this is a working, cost-effective and acceptable solution. I’m hoping that, as my data transfer needs grow, so too will the available Wifi speeds. Intel says it’s seeing real-world speeds of 100Mbit/sec. to 140Mbit/sec. for 802.11n equipment. Sounds good to me.
