Router Configuration – The Basics (Cont’d)

The next screen (Figure 15) shows an optional configuration that isn’t required by most of broadband connections. It allows you to specify a host name or to enter a specific MAC address to be used by your broadband router. Just leave like it is and click on Next.

Figure 15: Configuring the MAC address to be used.

The next screen is the most important one. There you will configure the name of your network (a.k.a. SSID) and enable encryption. The name of your network is how your computers will call your network. In our case we named our network “MyHome” as you can see on Figure 16. Please enable WEP encryption and choose the encryption level as “128 bit”. Now you will need to create an encryption key, which is like a password that will be used to encrypt data transferred in your network. For 128-bit WEP encryption the key must be a string of 26 hexadecimal characters, i.e. 0-9 plus letters A thru F. You can enter numbers at random. You can see an example on Figure 16 (for security reasons do not use the same number we are showing here). The important thing here is to write down this long number on a piece of paper. You will need to enter this number on all computers with wireless access to your network. Don’t forget to write this number down!

Figure 16: Configuring the name of your network and enabling encryption.

That’s it. The installation wizard ended and your wireless network is up and running now! What you will need to do now is configure the encryption key on every computer with wireless access to your network. We will show how this is done on the next page.

Figure 17: The installation wizard has ended.

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