Get More Out of Your Wireless Network

Wi-Fi: It's not just for laptops anymore. With these products and tips, you can cut the cord when making phone calls, streaming music or video, sharing files, and more.

Dead spots in your Wi-Fi network are bad enough when you're checking e-mail on your laptop; they're seriously aggravating if you're on a Wi-Fi phone call or listening to streaming audio. Strengthening the signal may be as simple as relocating your router to a more central location, away from obstructing materials like brick, concrete, metal, and water. Just mounting the router high on a wall may do the trick; see last September's Step-by-Step for more tips.

If you're ready to buy hardware, though, a new generation of stronger Wi-Fi equipment can give you whole-house coverage, while also increasing throughput, at a relatively low cost. See our latest look at several of these more powerful products.

Improve Streaming Media

If you watch a streaming video sent over a congested network, interference that might simply slow regular data transfers can ruin your movie experience with stutters or halts. Audio and VoIP calls are vulnerable too. Quality of Service networking technology tries to address this issue, primarily by prioritizing multimedia data. The IEEE standards body is creating a QoS standard for Wi-Fi, called 802.11e.

In the meantime, the Wi-Fi Alliance is promoting an interim standard (with elements that will be part of 802.11e) called WMM (for Wi-Fi multimedia). Many VoIP-ready routers have some form of QoS technology as well. If you're buying a new router or other Wi-Fi device, make sure it includes WMM or 802.11e QoS support, or comes with a vendor promise to do so via a firmware upgrade. Note, though, that both your router and your Wi-Fi adapters must use the same QoS technology.

Untether Games, Printers

While the white-hot Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable handheld game players both have built-in Wi-Fi, a simple Wi-Fi ethernet bridge lets the older GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox set-top game consoles handle wireless online game play. (The GameCube and the PlayStation 2 first need broadband ethernet adapters before they can go Wi-Fi.) Office printers and other networkable devices can go wireless with a bridge, too. Products such as Belkin's F5D7330 Wireless G Ethernet Bridge & Game Adapter usually cost from $75 to $100 and simply plug into the ethernet port on any network-capable device, with no driver or software required. You may need to connect the bridge to your computer first to enter your WPA or WEP encryption password, but that's it.