Subtitles of the Movie

Let's talk a little bit about wireless hardware. Now, there's a couple of things we need to talk about when we look at wireless hardware and their devices. First of all, you have hardware on the client device and that's normally a wireless network card or wireless nic. And we know that can be a, uh, PCMCI8 card or USB device of some sort or it can even be an internal device such as, uh, a PCI card for a full computer. The hardware can also be a wireless device such as an access point or a cell phone or a PDA. Those have wireless devices built in, but they are wireless devices. The wireless network interface card, we talked about a second ago, is usually installed in personal computers to enable their wireless connection to the access point or to each other. Now, most laptops and PDAs made nowadays have wireless network cards built in. Some of the older ones did not. You had to buy like a Compaq Flash card or a PCMCI8 card or even a USB card to, uh, attach to these devices. Essentially they serve to connect the clients to the access point themselves. Here's a typical PCI card that might fit into a desktop computer. Notice that it has the antenna on the back there. Some have, uh, different configurations for their antennas. Some have two antennas. The wireless access point basically receives and transmits signals to the clients and further connects them to another network, maybe a wired network, maybe the Internet, maybe another wireless network. Essentially it's the same thing as a wired hub or a switch. It performs the same function. Only in some cases it can also be a router, it can also perform security functions as well. Usually you would buy dedicated devices manufactured just for this purposes, such as a Linksys Wireless G device or something like that. But a wireless access point can also be a computer as well. Many Linux boxes can be configured to be wireless access points, for example. Here we've got a two, a couple of quick pictures of a, uh, a typical Soho type of, uh, of access points. Got the Planet access point and the Linksys. Two very popular access points. And we'll run into others too and we'll talk about others as well.