Router - don't leave home without it

[seajaycecil@yahoo.com]

When Willa and I travel we usually take two laptops. One for me to ''ramble around on'' and one for her to play cards on. We always take our ''router." It is a little white ''thingie'' with three antennas on the back and several led lights on the front and a place to plug in the Keocera card in the side. It enables us both to be online at the same time.

One thing. Both of our computers have Bluetooth for short-range wireless connectivity, so nothing has to be hardwired to either computer.

Simply stated, if we can get a ''signal,'' we can get an Internet connection and it is FREE (some campgrounds charge $3 a day for wi-fi service).

Note: The download rate is a lot faster than smoke signals or snail mail, but it is nowhere near that of Roadrunner.

Now, when you get to your campsite go to campers around you and tell them you have a router and they are welcome to log on and use your service. It doesn't seem to matter if others are logged on, because the speed is ''slow,'' at best. The people who are ''out of range'' of the router sometimes just walk over to my picnic table and use their laptop on the battery. I even ran a drop cord from the coach to the picnic table for those who had a bad battery in their laptops. I met some really nice people doing this.

I always warn them that this is an ''unsecured'' link to the Web.

Anyhow, by carrying your router you can use two computers at the same time.

Seajay the sailor man

[Guest BillAdams]

Just a couple of caveats here.

1) The internet service is not free, you are already paying something like $60/month for your cellular data service. It's just the sharing part that is free.

2) Very few users still have unlimited internet with their cellular air cards/phones so sharing this connection with your neighbors (or the whole park) will become VERY costly once you exceed your 5GB/month limit.

3) A non-secure network means just that. This includes all computers, including yours, that are not secure. If you have any personal information on your computer that you would rather not share with everyone on the planet, you might want to consider some kind of security.

4) The cellular internet connection is MUCH faster than you are describing. It's quite possible that you are seeing such slow speeds due to the number of people who are using your connection. As with all shared connections, the more users on at the same time the slower the connection will be.

[Guest Wayne77590]

Seajay,

Bill hit on the nail.

Using the Internet from either at home or through a cellular connection will eventually lead to "Time Sharing" somewhere along the line.

Let me give you a small example of Time Sharing. Let's take two sentences:

1: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back.

2: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

In a time sharing world where things are shared on a 50/50 basis, the sending of those two messages through a time sharing circuit would look like this:

(Short example) TNhoew qiusi ckt tbirmwen (and so on) You have to read every other letter to make any sense. So multiply that by 10 or 15 people using your router and you can see how it would slow down your transmissions considerably.

If anyone is interested in multiplexing they can look up the terms, "time division multiplexing," and "frequency division multiplexing" as starters.