Wired for Wireless?!

There were many great discussions at today’s Book Club webinar on Avoiding Wireless Networking Problems including: wiring for wireless, planning for access points, using repeaters, how to minimize interference and even how to improve bandwidth. There was a great combination of techie experts, novices, and in-betweeners.

For site surveying—measuring the strength of your signal throughout the library, a couple of tools were mentioned, including: speedtest.net and speakeasy.net/speedtest. My one contribution to today’s session was to mention The WiFi Detector shirt, pictured on the right. Pretty snazzy fashion, right?

Another resource mentioned to improve wireless speed was this source for an affordable, high-gain antenna: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1533865&CatId=374.

NetStumbler, a wireless network diagnostic tool, was also discussed. The Cookbook Chapter lists an article about it at Wi-Fi Planet that calls it the "Swiss Army knife of wireless network diagnostics."

Sorry to have missed this great webinar? No problem, listen to the archive or read and download Cookbook Chapter 2 from http://www.maintainitproject.org/cookbooks.

Thanks everyone, there were great issues brought up and quite a few tips that will be really helpful to a lot of libraries. And special thanks to Brenda Hough, Wonderous Queen of Webinars and an amazing facilitator.

--Stephanie Gerding, Independent Library Consultant and MaintainIT Contributor
http://stephaniegerding.com

---
Next Book Club: Meal Plan 3, “How Much Help Should You Provide Laptop Patrons?” The chapter is a free download here: http://www.maintainitproject.org/files/CB2_Meal%20Plan%20Three.pdf. Register here: https://cc.readytalk.com/registration/1aboa5dakke0/1sjlixarncf42

Technorati Tags: book club webinar wireless MaintainIT TechSoup