On Monday, we finally get BROADBAND. Hooray! We were going to put if off a while longer, but I got a Tivo for my birthday. That makes sense, right? Let me explain. We only have two phone jacks in the entire house. One is upstairs, and the other is downstairs. The downstairs phone jack is at eye level in the kitchen–basically made for a wall phone. So in order to use the Tivo downstairs, we would have to take the phone off the wall, put a splitter in, and run a phone line all the way across the house. Not only would we have a phone line running across all kind of bad places, but the splitter would make it impossible to have our phone mounted on the wall, so we’d have to put the phone on the kitchen counter. OR. We could put a USB wireless adapter on the Tivo! Fabulous, but a USB wireless adapter does absolutely nothing unless you actually have a wireless router. And a wireless router doesn’t do much unless you have broadband.
And not only am I getting a totally geeked wireless internet/Tivo set-up, but I’m getting it on the cheap, too. I ordered the hub, the USB adapter, and an ethernet card for my PC from amazon.com. By signing up for an Amazon.com Visa card, I got all that stuff for $70. Not to get all mushy on Amazon, but at Best Buy, all that stuff would have cost $120. Of course, I wouldn’t have to wait a week for it to get delivered, but still… I saved fitty bucks. Fitty bucks that will go towards purchasing an Apple Airport wireless card for Jason’s old iBook.
And can I rant about Best Buy for a minute? They only carry the most state-of-the-art equipment. Hello? Some of us still have Windows 98, and I could only find one ethernet card that had drivers for Windows 98 (and it was $10 more expensive than the other ethernet cards). Plus, they only had the “wireless G” routers and adapters. The Tivo and iBook only need “wireless B” so why should I spend extra money for speed that I can’t use? BASTARDS. Plus, Best Buy employees are possibly the slowest retail sales people in North America. Nothing is a priority for these people. Hustle, people, HUSTLE.
So anyway, stay tuned for my adventures in setting up a wireless network. It’s probably not as easy as I think it is.
