FIGURE A

Linksys' WET11 is small, handy, and pricey. Click picture for a larger image.

A brief overview of wireless networking
Many of you, like me, have already hooked up some form of WiFi wireless network (also known as 802.11). If you've done any network setup at all, you've heard terms like hubs, switches, and routers. We don't have space in this article to go into these terms in depth, but briefly, hubs and switches connect a bunch of computers like the hub and spokes of a wagon wheel.

When you're hooking things up, most consumer hubs and switches are indistinguishable--except that switches move traffic more efficiently, especially on large networks or with lots of traffic. A router, by definition, routes network traffic according to a set of rules. In the home networking world, that's usually between a broadband feed coming from outside the home and your computer. Most consumer routers are combined with a four-port switch, and with these, you get the ability to connect a bunch of computers together inside your home, and then route traffic out and back on your broadband connection.

The next step in this process is what's commonly called a WAP (Wireless Access Point). The typical consumer WAP is a small box with a four-port switch, a router for connecting to your broadband feed, and a WiFi transciever that lets you travel the Internet without wires. I like to do so from my couch, my porch, and in the morning from bed when I check the weather on my 802.11b-equipped Jornada Pocket PC.

Connecting your Xbox to the wireless network
So now, on one side of the house, you've got a few computers hard-wired into your WAP. You're surfing from the living room on your laptop. Down in the family room, you'd like to connect your Xbox (which has an Ethernet jack) to Xbox Live, the game console's multi-player broadband network.

Easy, right? Well, not really.

You could run a 40-foot CAT-5 cable (Category 5 Ethernet cable) from the back of the Xbox downstairs up to the WAP router upstairs. But, wait. Why would you do that if you have a WiFi network? Why not just plug in a WiFi card into the Xbox?

Uh, well, you can't. Despite it seeming like the Xbox is a regular PC in drag, there's no bus inside the Xbox for you to plug in a card. And you can't stick a PC Card in, like you might in your laptop, again because there's no slot for that purpose. Somehow, you've got to run a wire from your Xbox to ... something.