After using wireless for well over four months now, I wish I could actually do many of the things that Rajib Subba described in "Cableless and Wireless" (#129). The problem? Houses and buildings in Nepal are the biggest blocks or obstruction to the transmission distance. The wireless PC card and the base station should be able to provide connectivity over a distance of about 100m as per specifications. But in my office I cannot connect from the next floor. The steel-concrete building materials we use are virtual walls that do not allow these frequencies to penetrate and thus the much hyped distance and ease of mobility must be taken with a pinch of salt. It is a great solution for an office environment with many PC's within one large area where one base station can connect upto 50 PCs. Security also is not an issue as it comes with robust encryption technology. And yes, I did check my emails sitting in my garden with a wireless PC card in my laptop-but to do that I had to take a looooong ethernet cable to connect the base station outside my house. Not to mention another looooong electric extension cord to power up the base station. So much for wireless mobility.

Sanjay B Shah,
by email