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" Wireless Living It&amp;#039;s time to cut the cord THAT TANGLE OF WIRES under your desk is about to be a distant memory. So is the old notion that you have to be tethered to a phone line or cable modem to surf the Internet. New wireless technologies like Wi-Fi can eighty-six the clutter behind your computer and have you roaming the house--and the world--while you roam the Web. Of course, new technologies just aren&amp;#039;t the same without a heaping serving of confusion and jargon, so we&amp;#039;ve prepared this primer to clear up some of the baffling lingo and help you get started.  A HOUSEFUL OF DATA Any network, whether it has wires or not, has certain properties. Think about the network in your office: Most often, people share printers, share a connection to the Internet (usually in the form of a T-1 line or some other high-capacity feed that can handle multiple simultaneous connections without slowing down too much), and share files through a single server. A home network can operate the same way. But until now, dissolving the family feud over Internet time meant ripping up the house in order to lay a mile of cable as if you were installing an entire phone system from scratch. Wireless networks, using a technology called Wi-Fi, for Wireless Fidelity, can provide the same functions as a wired network by using electromagnetic waves that course through the rooms and hallways of your house and stretch out into the reaches of your patio and yard. Network signals emanate from what is commonly called a base station or a wireless router, a book-sized device that plugs in to your cable or DSL modem (a normal dial-up connection is too narrow to be shared by more than one computer) and converts your home into a huge bubble of data. Any computer, portable or fixed, laptop or desktop, PC or Mac, can receive the signal when equipped with a small Wi-Fi card, enabling it to log on to the Web, send e-mail, exchange files, and send orders to the printer from anywhere in your home. If you have more than one computer in the house, they can all use the same Internet connection (and so long as nobody&amp;#039;s doing any heavy-duty downloading, it won&amp;#039;t affect your connection speed) and exchange files with one another. Networked computers appear on one another&amp;#039;s desktops as icons, and depending on how you set up the privileges, you can send files, receive files, or both among all the computers on the network. MP3 files can be downloaded to a portable device anywhere in the home, or they can be shared between network computers instead of having to put files on disk or e-mail them. Wi-Fi is perfect for homes where roommates or family members battle for an online connection. And with routers having a range of nearly five hundred feet, you can send e-mails while sipping your morning coffee out on the deck. Wi-Fi has applications outside the home environment as well. You may have already read about places like Starbucks and airport terminals offering wireless Internet access through their own Wi-Fi networks. AT&amp;amp;amp;T, IBM, and Intel are gearing up to build a wireless infrastructure that would be within five minutes&amp;#039; walking distance of any person in the top fifty metropolitan areas of the U.S. While the pricing plan for such a system has yet to be determined (in some places like New York&amp;#039;s Bryant Park, access is free of charge), anyone with a Wi-Fi card will soon be able to access the Internet in a hotel bar, a shopping mall, or while riding the bus through town. Wi-Fi Ware Two ways to set up a Wi-Fi network in your home: lean &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; mean or all-you-can-eat. The former is best accomplished by dropping about $100 on Netgear&amp;#039;s MR814 wireless router, which, when used with Wi-Fi cards installed in your laptops, acts as your transceiver, or base station. The router not only allows for many wireless connections but also features several standard wired Ethernet ports. For more versatility, Toshiba&amp;#039;s Magnia SG20 wireless media center does all that and adds up to 80 gigabytes of hard-drive storage to the mix. (Depending on hard-drive capacity, prices range from $1,399 to $1,999.) This way, you can access shared files like music or video off the SG20 without clogging up your own hard drive. Even cooler, the SG20 allows you secure, private access to your own personal video and music files from Internet-equipped computers around the world.  At $699, Hewlett-Packard&amp;#039;s new iPAQ h5455 costs as much as some desktop PCs, but if you want the James Bond PDA, this is it. Built-in Bluetooth (see page 150) means it can sync with your PC just by being near it, built-in Wi-Fi puts it on the Internet, and NEVO infrared technology can make it a universal remote for every TV, DVD player, and stereo component in your house. The h5455 even has a security feature that&amp;#039;s straight out of Q Branch: a fingerprint scanner mounted on the case that prohibits anyone but you from turning it on and checking your state secrets. --S. G.  Wi-Fi vs. Bluetooth ANOTHER STANDARD IN PLAY RIGHT NOW is something called Bluetooth. You can&amp;#039;t really use Bluetooth for a housewide network (it doesn&amp;#039;t have the capacity or the speed), but it&amp;#039;s a convenient way to eliminate some of the wires in your life. Whereas Wi-Fi is a robust format that can accommodate multiple high-speed wireless Internet users, the lower-capacity Bluetooth simply enables some peripheral devices to communicate with each other. Your PDA can sync with your PC without being put in the cradle, your laptop can wirelessly send a print order to the printer, and a tiny earpiece can wirelessly send and receive calls through your mobile phone, all while your phone is sitting in your pocket. Soon enough, perhaps this year, Bluetooth-equipped speakers will hit the streets and you&amp;#039;ll be able to play your MP3 collection from any room in the house, directly from your Bluetooth-enabled laptop.  If all you want to do is clean up your desk and you don&amp;#039;t feel like throwing your existing computer in the trash, Microsoft&amp;#039;s Wireless Optical Desktop for Bluetooth should do you just fine. Its suite of Bluetooth products includes a keyboard, a mouse, and a Bluetooth transceiver for about $160. The keyboard and mouse use Bluetooth to operate wirelessly with your desktop&amp;#039;s hard drive, which, in turn, communicates with other Bluetooth-equipped devices, like PDAs, printers, and cell phones.  Adding a Bluetooth printer to the mix keeps the desk all nice and tidy and also means that one printer can be shared by desktop and portable devices (such as a PDA or laptop) without all the wires. We recommend the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 995c. At around $400, it isn&amp;#039;t the cheapest ink-jet out there, but when you consider that it would cost nearly half that much to upgrade an old printer (and then you&amp;#039;re still stuck with an old printer), it starts to look like a pretty good deal.  Bluetooth was pioneered by Swedish mobile company Ericsson, so it&amp;#039;s no surprise that its cell phones are some of the first to incorporate it. Now linked up with Sony on the mobile front, the Sony Ericsson T68i (about $150 at a cell-phone service provider) can wirelessly sync up address and calendar info with your PDA, act as a wireless dial-up modem for your laptop, and access parts of the Internet on its own, thanks to its GPRS (Global Packet Relay Service), which turns your phone into a palm-sized minibrowser. And the HBH-30 headset ($180) allows you to take calls without even touching your phone, and all without fumbling with wires. --S. G. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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