* An update on my home office projects, complete with reader advice
Some recent columns have generated a torrent of e-mail. Many readers asked for an update on my recent home office projects; a gratifying number offered ideas and guidance. As requested, here’s an update, complete with sage reader advice.
Last month, I announced my intent to replace my business land-line phone with my cell phone (see editorial link below). The only trade-off seemed to be a more rudimentary fax setup (and I rarely send or receive faxes anyway) and possibly poorer voice quality with the cell phone.
Well, now I’m cellular-only, and life is good. I invested in a high-quality ear-piece-and-microphone setup from Jabra (http://www.jabra.com), and I swear the sound quality of the Cingular wireless network is actually superior to that of the hard-wired phone. Some people get lousy wireless coverage inside their homes, but not me.
The fiscal benefits of ditching the land line haven’t kicked in yet, because a few of you advised me to give the cell-only plan a trial run. But at this rate, I will cancel the business line at the end of November and cackle all the way to the bank.
Most of the e-mail on that column centered around faxing. Many of you pointed out fax services such as eFax (http://www.efax.com) that convert faxes to e-mail and send them to you in that format (and vice versa), for $15 per month or less. Good idea, but my light fax load doesn’t merit the expense; I’m content to route the fax machine through my home land line and put up with the inconvenience of manual receipt.
Finally, several readers noted that, as one of you put it, “There are certainly many who need the land line so DSL can ride those same wires into our SOHO.” Great point, and I apologize for the omission – I should have noted that my broadband comes in via cable modem. DSL users might be able to get “naked DSL” – broadband sans voice line. Targeting land-line-abandoners like me, Qwest and Covad have begun offering this service, and analysts expect others to follow suit.
A few months back, I wrote a two-part series detailing my wireless network setup (see editorial links below). Folks occasionally drop me a line asking if I’m still happy with the performance. The answer is a thousand times yes. On both my work PC (which is the one connected to the cable modem) and the home computer (which receives its signal from a wireless router), we’ve experienced no performance or reliability problems.
As I noted at the time, the installation wasn’t a raging success; I had to call a local IT guru to help me puzzle through the default settings on my D-Link router.
Along those lines, a reader e-mailed another bit of WLAN advice: Be sure to disable your Secure Sockets ID (SSID) broadcast. By default, most wireless access points are set to broadcast their SSID, which allows anyone nearby to detect both the existence of the wireless access point and the SSID string, the reader explained.
Turning on encryption is a vital step, of course, but it doesn’t prevent unwanted clients from identifying the access point. Disabling the SSID broadcast will prevent other systems from accidentally connecting to your network. Potential clients can still see a wireless network, but because the SSID is blank they can’t connect to the access point unless they know the exact SSID.
Your e-mail advice and experiences make this job rewarding – please keep ’em coming!
