Aaron Weiss

Our monthly Q&A series offers advice to those seeking help with home or small business WLANs. This month our Guru considers ways to connect to a nearby WLAN from a truck or RV, researches compatibility between a popular Wi-Fi router and DD-WRT, and helps a reader bridge the gap between an Airport Express and another […]

Our monthly Q&A series offers advice to those seeking help with home or small business WLANs. This month our Guru offers advice on keeping out the bad guys, DHCP servers, Tomato, and more. If you’ve traveled at all in recent years, you know that you can find some strange things in hotel rooms. Things like […]

Over at Wi-Fi Planet’s monthly Ask the Wi-Fi Guru column, we receive a large helping of reader questions. Over time, some common themes have emerged—problems with wireless signal strength, securing connections, and anything related to the iPhone, for example. But, even given the intensity of interest in these topics, the single most popular subjects amongst […]

Our monthly Q&A series offers advice to those seeking help with home or small business WLANs. This month our Guru ponders several WLAN mysteries–including one unsolved. Can you help? At the risk of imperiling my credibility here, allow me to make a confession—I am not much of an early adopter. Early adopters are necessary for the […]

When two computers connected via the Internet want to talk to one another, they do so through a channel called a “port.” If each computer were an apartment building, a port would be a particular apartment. For example, if your computer contacts the Web server of a remote computer, it usually knocks at the door […]

Last month, we celebrated the arrival of spring with a warning about how leaves can affect your wireless signal. With summer temperatures rising, Mother Nature isn’t done with us yet. Can heat and humidity affect your wireless network? Many anecdotal reports suggest increased problems with wireless links in hot and humid conditions. To be fair, […]

April showers bring May flowers—and also, if you live in the northern climes, leaves. In the northeastern US, everything turns green in May, which for us humans is inspiring and invigorating. But if you are a wireless router associating with clients throughout the great outdoors, leaves can be your worst enemy. Unfortunately, mother nature has […]

If you’re like most right-thinking people, you probably use your wireless router the way that nature intended—to broadcast wireless signals to clients. But, if you’ve flashed your router with an alternative firmware, such as the increasingly popular Tomato, you can actually run your router in reverse. In other words, you can use your wireless router […]

Looking to track your bandwidth to scope out malware, conform to metering policies from your ISP, better utilize limited resources–or just because you’re curious? Our Wi-Fi Guru walks you through Tomato’s sophisticated bandwidth monitoring tools. In the early days of the Internet, dial-up users were charged based on how many hours per month they spent […]

In the December 2008 installment of our monthly Q&A series, the Wi-Fi Guru addresses range extension in a variety of deployment scenarios. Seeing as this month of December finds us with a collection of questions related to extending wireless range, just imagine who would benefit most from a seamless global Wi-Fi network: Santa! You can imagine […]

In the November 2008 installment of our monthly Q&A series, the Wi-Fi Guru covers SSIDs, OpenWRT, and cordless phone interference to help a college student, an entrepreneur, and a home user with their Wi-Fi dilemmas.   Q: It seems my AT&T ID-2820 2.4 GHz cordless phone broadcasts a buzzing noise. But my ears don’t actually hear […]

Actiontec GT724WGRwww.actiontec.com Price: $89.99Pros: Automatic universal DSL configuration; great wireless range; advanced QoS support.Cons: Clunky administration interface; limited wireless configuration options such as lack of WPA2; Internet access controls cumbersome to setup. Although DSL is often the slower and sometimes more finicky of terrestrial broadband options, it nonetheless delivers Internet access to some half (or […]