There are now Wi-Fi Hot-Spots in this Four Parks Community The long wait is over for many residents of the Florence Gardens area including Vista Hermosa. Residents are now enjoying genuine high speed Internet at an affordable price. GiGoNET has installed WiFi in Vista Hermosa and several locations in Florence Gardens since winter of 2005-2006. Since May 26,2006, WCC (a company out of Texas), has begun their work of installing WiFi coverage in Florence Gardens. WCC has since, pulled out of Florence Gardens. What is needed to hook up? A PCI card for wireless connections (for nearby Access Points), it has an antenna at the back. A better choice may be an external device, so it could be moved around for the best location. Fry's Electronics is recommended (their staff are very helpful), Fry's Electronics is located near Interstate-10 and Baseline, in the Tempe/Phoenix area. Check online at www.outpost.com. Non-exhaustive list of services If you're purchasing an external device, the desktop bridges.. to get... are now called WET54G Linksys no longer makes the WET11. Click here for the current Hotspot locations by GiGoNet, in Florence Gardens There's also an additional hotspot near Colorado Ave & McFarland Blvd. If you are located a rather long distance from any of these areas or have any of the blockages mentioned in NOTES (next paragraph), it may be necessary to purchase an outdoor Wi-Fi receiving antenna. More than likely the best place to shop for such equipment could be Fry's Electronics, near Interstate-10 and Baseline, in the Tempe/Phoenix area. Check online at www.outpost.com (there's a toll-free number listed on the web site).   NOTE: Some may be able to connect much further away as it depends upon their equipment. Among the things that affect a signal, are trees and the amount of water in the tree. Another item is elevation; since Vista Hermosa is the highest location of all the four parks, homes further down cannot see the signal from Vista Hermosa even though they are physically near-by. NOTE: Additional hotspots may be added during the winter of 2006 & 2007 and may be based upon areas in which requests are made. For some assistance in getting connected, contact the Webmaster of this site. The most common terms you'll hear, concerning the nature of networking include:   Bandwidth Availability  Protocols   Packet·  Mbps TCP/IP  LAN WAN VPN To ensure that a computer has the fastest connection, locate it as close to the access point as possible. More technical information

                       Bandwidth: Refers to the speed of the network. It's a term that refers to the size of the network pipe through which your data travels. Generally speaking, the more bandwidth you have, the better your speed is. Things that can affect bandwidth include number of users on the network, types of traffic on the network (big multimedia files will slow down a network), and availability of routers and access points.

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·                             Availability: Refers to the availability of the network. If the network is always down, it isn't very available. You should always strive to run a high-availability network. In wireless networking, distance from an access point can affect your network's availability, because the broadcast signal deteriorates with distance.

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·                             Packet: Data sent over a network is sent in packets. Each packet has a header and a payload. The header helps identify the packet as part of a message, and the payload carries actual information (such as a piece of an email, a part of an image, and so on).

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·                             Mbps (megabits per second): Refers to how the speed on a network is measured and is used to describe the bandwidth. A 10 Mbps network connection allows you to send data at the theoretical rate of 10 megabits per second. I say theoretical because a network connection is just like a highway or road. One might say that a certain road can carry up to 500 vehicles per minute, but placing that many cars on the road would make for a very congested road. The more congested the road, the less useful it is, and the slower the traffic goes. Same with a network. If you share a 10 Mbps wireless connection that's fully utilized, what you'll end up with is a very slow connection -- it's literally bogged down with data packets.

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·                             Protocols: Data packet transmission is governed by protocols, which are nothing more than rules that dictate how data travels on a network, how it's structured, who can accept what data, and how data receipt is acknowledged.

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·                             TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): The most common protocol for transmitting and receiving data. TCP/IP works by breaking data into hundreds or thousands of individual packets and sending them across the network. Although breaking up your information into lots of different packets, sending them across the network and putting them back together at the destination might seem like a big waste of time and energy, its actually incredibly fast and efficient.

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·                             LAN (local area network): One of the two types of networks. LANs are small networks that cover a small area; in other words, your wireless home network.

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·                             WAN (wide area network): A network that connects two or more LANs with the public internet or some remote network. We don't cover WANs at all in this class, but in the last lesson, we cover connecting to your company's LAN from your home network using a VPN.

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·                             VPN (virtual private network): An encrypted tunnel through which you can send email, files, and other data. VPNs are very useful because they allow different organizations separated by great distances to be part of one big WAN using the public internet. Because all traffic in a VPN is encrypted, only those users who have the decryption key can read the traffic. That way, VPN users can take advantage of connectivity using the internet and feel secure that only those users who should see network data are seeing it.

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Non-exhaustive list of services