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The project from hell continues.

The existing cat5 ports are all wired to an old phone system, hence useless to me because they must be used for phone lines.

Late 1800s 3 story house. Lovely place to live, awful to even think about wiring.

So I will need to do a wireless system for most of the users.

I need to make is as robust as possible because of

lots of other networks in the area
data entered over this network will be entered in remote computer via remote desktop and we don't want any jiggly data
network will transmit sensitive data

the question - time to step up to a cisco router and adapters. we use a linksys combo system at the other office and the range is not great and it fades in and out, etc.

What is the best reasonable (i.e. not learning cisco programming language) security level I should shoot for?

etc.

TIA

John

SonicWall uses GUI also makes some good wireless systems.. But most of the new Cisco stuff is all GUI, no need to learn RIP anymore for the most part from what I understand.

GL!

eGo

Another option to consider instead of WiFi is a powerline network. In theory you'll get much higher bandwidth without the problem of radio echoes and interference of standard Wifi:

Starter Kit: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=533
Additional Adapters: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=561

thanks all...hadn't considered powerline, but that would certainly be the easiest

I've never actually used powerline as a full blown network (with more than two units) just as a point-to-point replacement for a long cable. For instance to connect a switch to a router in an office that we couldn't run a 200' cable across to the other floor, and wireless wasn't practical. Worked fine.

I used to use HPNA in the past, always worked pretty well. The throughput left somewhat to be desired, something that the Powerline adapters have gotten better at. Linksys has some good products you might want to look at:
http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellit ... 0122279L09

The PLE200 or PLE300 is likely what you will be looking for. Make sure you get one for each computer and one additional for the router.

Hard to say their how well they will work though. Wireless with extenders usually does the trick for most places, unless you trying to use it in a castle or something...

How well do those D-links usually work by the way?

I ended up going with the netgear powerline adapters with the 128 bit encryption. The equivalent linksys was the same price but people on newegg had reported lots of failure in the first couple of months and they had to go through linksys for replacements which they said was completely useless. the netgear ones have the newegg cheerful 1 year replacement so we'll see how it goes.

thanks to everyone for your help!

John

I've only used one once Zyfer, and it worked fine, as I said basically as a substitute for a 200' cat 5 cable that was impossible to run in this particular building. Throughput seemed as good as a regular 100 Mbit cabled line.

I'll do a mini-review!