Glenn Fleishman has a good article about wireless networking in PC World. In the article he suggests how to boost your network's reliability and tells why many problems occur.

It should not be a surprise that an article in PC World is largely focused on PCs and it does spend a great deal of time on the woes of setting up wireless networking on Windows. However it does have good tips and some ideas for users of other platforms as well.

This article follows on several days of wireless problems for one of my clients. Their connection with their Charter Pipeline cable modem has been pretty rock solid since December. For the period between December and April 21 they always had the same IP and things worked swimmingly. Just as they left on a trip the trouble started. Upon their return on April 27 a new address was assigned. On the 28th the connection was dropped again but with a reset of the modem they again got the new address. All of these had been in the same subnet. Then yesterday at about noon Pacific, the network changed to a different Class A network. No longer is it a 66.215 but its now a 24.205

All of this means not a whole lot, but the reason to bring it up is about service and communication. I'm sure my clients are not the only customers of Charter who aren't geeks. Since they are the customer (not me) it becomes convoluted to try and squeeze information out of the company. They have a website with a "knowledgebase" but it gets stuck in an infinite loop of wanting you to accept their use policy so you can't actually get to the data. It would just be a really smart move on the part of companies like Charter to publish somewhere a simple document that can easily be found mentioning the changes they are making. That way when a consultant gets a call it will be a simpler process to narrow down what's happening.