If you're like me, you've probably grown weary of looking for phone cords to plug your laptop into, only to find that 1). they don't exist or are the wrong type; 2). they don't reach across the room or into the next room where you need to be or where your laptop is located. Maybe you've even grown weary of fighting with your 12 or 10 year-old for the only available modem phone line in the house. If this fits your domestic and office Internet situation, then Proxim has a rather elegant solution for you.

With their line of RangeLAN products, Proxim has been previously well known for their corporate and university based wireless LANs. Thanks to Proxim, on many college campuses and corporations, one need only load some software, plug in a PCMCIA card and viola! Wireless Internet (and if needed) intranet access anywhere on campus or corporate headquarters.

	Proxim

With their Symphony line, Proxim now extends this wireless availability to the home or small office. To make this work on your laptop you need two pieces of hardware. The first is the Symphony modem which hooks into a standard phone jack. Next you'll need the cordless PC card that goes into your PCMCIA slot and communicates with the modem. The modem is an analog 56k modem and communicates with the PC card via 2.4 GHz radio waves at 1.6 Mbps. The maximum radius between card and modem is 150 feet. Ideally, the modem should be located off the floor. Set up with the card's bundled software is straightforward. Just hook up the Symphony modem (making sure it's turned on), insert the PC card and then load the software. The manuals that come with modem and card are well-detailed and even give solid troubleshooting advice. Availability of the card and modem can be found through Proxim's on-line store which lists several on-line resellers. I found the best price to be at NECX.

Once you're set up you have several options. The first thing you'll notice is that you have a virtual wireless network that can be configured as a multiple user network or as a single user. You can pick whichever ISP account(s) you currently use and Proxim will dial it for you via the network and Symphony modem. Or if you choose, you can allow your individual ISP dialer setup software to select the Symphony modem and dial it via it's own dialing software or through Windows' Dial-Up Networking. If you don't plan on allowing multiple users or your network, I would opt for the latter dialing option as Symphony's dialer will occasionally have problems with area codes. Additionally, I found that on my laptop, unless I disabled most of the background programs in the System Tray, adding ISP's to Symphony's menu had the tendency to cause a crash. In addition, certain ISP's such as AOL, will only function in Symphony's single user mode.

	Wireless Bridge

The real beauty and flexibility of this product is the ability to have multiple users share the same modem and same ISP access simultaneously without tying up more than one line. At home, this avoids many spats. Aside from the laptop, the Symphony can also function with a modem card installed into a standard desktop PC. Additionally, let's say you use one type of network in the office (e.g. Ethernet), Symphony remembers your original network settings on installation so that when you go home, you can switch between Symphony and your office network.

A word of warning however for those of you dwelling in the more rural or suburban areas. Since phone line integrity in those areas are worse than in metropolitan zones, Symphony has the tendency to dial in and then lose the connection after several minutes. The reason according to their tech staff is that the modem grabs the connection at full tilt and that some suburban phone lines with inferior line quality, can't handle the high rate. Their recommended fix is to "dumb down" the modem rate to 33.6k (easily done through the Control Panel settings on the laptop) which does the trick. They also state that they are working on this rural problem.

As you can tell, I think this a really nifty product that takes the couch (and bed) potato surfing concept to paraphrase Woody Allen, to a whole other level. If wireless mobility at home or office with your laptop is the goal than Proxim's Symphony is the answer. In the future I plan to look at the Symphony in tandem with Proxim's products for Windows CE-based products.

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