Cisco 350 for sharing DSL

[drdan]

I have been enjoying a sweet deal for about a year and a half. The woman who owns a mortgae company in the building I'm in (and married to the brother of the guy I rent from allowed us to be on their T1 wireless connection for $15/month. The mortgage company is moving however and we need to find something else since we've gotten addicted to DSL over dial up. We have these expensive Cisco Aironet 350 cards in our computers and I saw a 350 router I might be able to get fairly reasonable ($300-400). I don't know what we are going to get yet though. We will probably share whatever connection we get. Right now our options are a relatively low IDSL with 144kbs up and down guaranteed or a 400kbs Directway Satellite dish (who I haven't talked to yet. Can either of these be fed into a Cisco wireless router and distributed to our three computers? We really don't want to get a wired connection as it's 35 feet or so between computers. If we need to go wired how far do regular cables go? (CAT5?) The Cisco equipment we have used seems excellent but I need to be sure it will work before I try to grab this deal.

[Ghost_Hacker]

The max distance for Cat5 is 100 meters or about 300 feet.

The Cisco 350 is , from what I know, an access point not a router, so you won't be able to connect it directly to the internet. It has an uplink port so you might be able to use it with any internet connection that provides a "finished" (or always open connection) cat5 wire to your network.

I would read the documentation before purchasing the Cisco, since ,for a few computers, a Linksys wireless setup would be cheaper and easier to setup.

If it where me I would just go with a wired solution.

EDIT The 350 get's it power thru the cat5 cable, so you'll need to get a power injector from Cisco or use someother Cisco device between the access point (AP) and the internet connection. You can forget about using it for a DSL connection as it provides no such functionality.

Good Luck

[drdan]

I'm new to this and I did not follow what you said. We are currently using a Cisco 350 system for our wireless DSL connection. The woman next door has the T1 and the router and we bought Cisco wireless PCI cards to be on the system. They are expensive cards and it has been an excellent and reliable system. I realize that just getting ethernet cards and a wired system will be cheaper but it would mean exposed wires running through our chiropractic office halls and treatment rooms or drilling holes in the ceilings several places and I would rather just go wireless.

When you say the Cisco system has no DSL function I don't know what you mean. Are you saying that it has to have a T1 input and can't take input from an IDSL line or satellite DSL?

What's the difference in an access point and a router?

[Ghost_Hacker]

The Cisco 350 doesn't have anyway to "talk" DSL, so unlike a Linksys DSL router, which can log into and "talk" DSL, the Cisco can't. So you can't use it with a DSL line like you could a Linsys DSL router.

The Cisco 350 is an access point which means it can connect a wireless LAN to a wired LAN.( It behaves much like a wired hub, in fact you could think of it as a wireless hub.) It just "repeats" the signals it gets from wireless computers onto the wired network or from the wired network back onto the wireless one (or from one wireless access point to another). Its used to replace a "wired" hub, which is proably how you friends are using it. If your internet connection is "finished" in such a way so that all you need to provide is a hub, then the Cisco 350 will work, otherwise it won't (in other words, the ISP provides a router with the broadband connection, so that all you need is a hub to connect your computers to the router).

A router, on the other hand, is used to connect one network to another network and in a small office or home setting is used to connect a LAN to the internet. DSL routers will allow you to input your DSL login information into the router's settings, so that the router can login to your DSL line for you. Again this is something the 350 can't do.

Look at the diagram displayed on this page:

Cisco 350 data sheet


EDIT There are some other diagrams that I can't get this page to display the link to correctly. Oh well.... A Googel lookup of Cisco 350 setup overview should bring it up.

Notice how the 350 is used to replace a hub and that a router (or someother method) is still used to connect the whole network to the internet. The 350 is used here only to connect the wireless LAN to the wired LAN.

The 350s (access points and wireless cards) are expensive because they have alot of Cisco's proprietary wireless security protocals built into them. (LEAP,PEAP and others) If all you need is wireless connectivity and don't care about these other security functions, then a Linksys, Dlink, or whatever is a cheaper way to go.



If I where you, I would go over and look very close at how your friends are using their 350 to see if it fits into your plans. Have them provide you with all the documentation and read it till you have an idea of how the 350 is used. Make sure your buying either a 350 access point or a 350 wireless bridge (they are not the same but a bridge can be setup as an access point).

Frankly, I recommend to my clients that if you don't know "networks" stay away from anything made by Cisco.


Good Luck

[drdan]

Thanks for the detailed info. I have a better understanding of it now. The IDSL connection we were thinking of does have a router so I am assuming that may work to comnnect to the 350 access point. I did get enough understanding to realize I need someone who knows what they are doing to check things out before buying anything. Since we already have the cards and I may be able to get the 350 access point for $300 I figured it wouldn't be much more expensive to go that way and have a system already proven to work well in this office.