I live in an "earth-sheltered" home made of concrete and rebar and
covered with 4' of soil. I have a netgear wireless b/g router that not
only penetrates every room in the house, but 100 feet out to the pool.
Excellent reception everywhere on my 1 acre of property. Bandwidth
maxes out my 3-4Mbit cable connection. Took me about 20 minutes to set
up the encryption to keep neighbors out. Ditch the cable and get a
netgear.

Glad to hear that you have good result with your wireless setup. But I
need to stream videos (MPEG-1 and MPEG-2) through the network
connection; therefore, I believe the performance requirement on the
network connection is higher than just for sharing printer/files and
sharing an internet connection. From reading articles in net, I have
an impression that wireless is probably iffy for streaming video (some
may have adequate result, some may have OK result with signal
boosters, and some may not at all). This sounds like a lot of trial
and error to find out if this will work or not. I prefer to use the
"sure" thing. Seem like I don't really need to go to giga-bps network
connection (1000Mbps); but I probably better off using 100Mbps
connection that will need to be wired, and this will be the "sure"
thing.

If I cannot find a way to run cable through the house, I probably will
try the 802.11a/g combo that is currently available to see if it is
good enough. If that is still not good enough, I will wait one year or
two for the next generation of wireless connection that is supposed to
be able to reach 100Mbps or so (if I read this correctly from the
wireless round-up in the latest issue of PC Magazine).

Jay Chan