Wireless Broadband connections - a begginers question

Please bear with me here and forgive my complete ignorance on the subject. I'm looking for a little advice on wireless connection to the net.

I'm about to buy a laptop and I want to go online from home using a wireless Broadband connection. What do I need to look for? The laptops I'm looking at feature 'Integrated Wireless Lan 802.11g' but do I need anything else like a router or is that it? Are there any disadvantages using a wireless broadband connection regarding the speed of the connection?

Thanks in advance for your help.

"vrem" wrote in news:4262984f snipped-for-privacy@mk-nntp-2.news.uk.tiscali.com:

You can get a wireless router or you can get a wired router and a wireless AP and plug the WAP into the wire router. To me, you're better off with a wire router and a WAP as wireless technology is constantly changing while the old solid as a rock wire technology never changes.

You can also just get a wireless NIC and put into the machine that has the Internet connection and use ICS and AD-HOC mode on both wireless NIC(s) and share resources between machines and have the laptop share the Internet connection.

The choice is yours to make.

Duane :)

And just in case you don't know, ICS stands for "internet connection sharing", and is part of the windows operating system. Ad-hoc means that the network is peer-to-peer (no server; all computers are equal).

For a long time my computers were setup this way. The advantage is you do not need to buy extra hardware like a router. The disadvantage is that the computer which has the internet connection has to be on AND someone logged on in order for the networked computer(s) to use the internet.

Both ways tend to be easy to setup.

HTH Damase

can I suggest the linksys wag54g gateway, this has an inbuilt adsl modem, and wireless router in one package, there are others similar, but if you just buy the router you will still need to get a modem

cheers, Jim

Cheers for the replies. Very helpful.

Duane Arnold wrote in news:Xns963BBD47BAC99notmenotmecom@63.240.76.16:

This is true, but lately it seems that the routers are cheaper than the access points.