Word: router
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...technology's simplicity, and the ease with which anyone can provide it. Ignore the geeks who use Wi-Fi's painful official designation, 802.11. Here's a more familiar name for the technology: radio. The Wi-Fi card in your laptop is a receiver, and the Wi-Fi router--which plugs into a cable or DSL modem at your home or office or coffee shop--is nothing more than a short-range transmitter-receiver. (Here's a piece of trivia for your next cocktail party: the patent on which Wi-Fi technology is based was filed back...
...Airport and to PC geeks as 802.11b, is an increasingly popular way to get online without being tethered to a cable. The connection hangs in the air as a radio signal, ready to be received within 300 ft. of the transmitter. Plug an Internet cable into a wireless router (I used a $199 DSL router from Belkin), put wireless cards in all your computers (they cost about $100 a pop), and you're ready to surf on the move. So, as I discovered when I took a laptop outside, are the neighbors...
...heart of your network will be a wireless access point and cable/DSL router, preferably one device that does both. These two-in-one units, sometimes called wireless gateways, start at $150 and often throw in a few Ethernet ports too, so you can connect a printer or desktop PC using a standard Ethernet cable. I had a smooth experience with the Linksys Etherfast Wireless AP+Cable/DSL Router ($169). Similar products are made by D-link, Intel, NetGear, Siemens, SMC and 2Wire...
...routers and network cards come with software to walk you through the installation. The steps will vary slightly, depending on each computer's operating system. The older the OS, the trickier it can be; Windows XP is designed to detect and configure a PC card to talk to an existing network, and getting an iBook running Mac OS X to communicate with my Linksys router was a breeze...
...addresses. You can get these things from your Internet provider; your customer-service rep will know what you're talking about. Each is just a series of numbers (e.g., 123.43.2.1) that you'll be prompted to plug in during setup. (If your provider supports a protocol called DHCP, your router should retrieve these settings automatically when you plug it in.) You may also be asked to choose an SSID (service set identifier), work-group names and a wireless channel; keep these consistent for all of your machines...