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Cool Things You can Do with a Wireless Router
Rohan Naravane, Feb 18, 2011 1603 hrs ISTThat little box does a lot more than just transmit Internet through the airwaves
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Thanks to the proliferation of Wi-fi in laptops, cellphones and even tablets now, a wireless router has almost become a must at home. These little boxes that sit unnoticed in the corner of the room have evolved over the years, and can perform special tricks that could be of great benefit to you. What are these things? Check 'em out:
Wireless Music Transmission
Apple's Airport Express is a tiny router that's almost as big as the charging adapter for a Macbook. Other than the petite size, it has this one unique feature that lets you stream music wirelessly from your PC. It has a standard 3.5mm audio jack that lets you connect it to a pair of speakers or even that old music system you might have. 
So, you place the Airport Express next to the speakers, hook it up and access iTunes from your computer (Mac and Windows supported, no support for Linux). Once the computer is wirelessly connected to the router, it will give you the option to select which speakers you want to play the music from. Just toggle and voila, your music will start playing through those speakers despite you sitting meters away from it.
This can come in handy especially when your laptop has all your music and you don't want to be tied down to a particular place.
Wireless Printing
This feature comes not just with the Airport Express, but also routers from other manufacturers (like the ASUS WL-520GU). There's a USB port on the router that lets you connect your printer for wirelessly firing a print command from a distance. Some even allow scanning. This is really useful if you have a laptop, as you don't have to walk over to the printer, connect the USB cable and then hit 'Print'. 
Although nowadays a few affordable printer-scanners come with Wi-fi built in, this feature will be of help to those printers that don't have Wi-fi.
Automatic Bandwidth Management
Imagine this situation, you've kept your P2P downloads on at full-blast and somebody tries to access the Internet using the web browser. That person will get frustrated with the page load times, and unless he or she doesn't know how to pause your downloads, the problem will persist. A great tool on some ASUS routers we saw was the EzQoS automatic bandwidth management. 
This is a setting in the firmware of the router itself, and lets you prioritize amongst a couple of preset Internet use-cases -- like Gaming, Internet browsing, VOIP/Video Streaming, and P2P file sharing. All you have to do is set your preferences, and the router will do the rest. ASUS even has a dummy configuration page for people to experience how it actually works.
So, the next time when the aforementioned occurs, the router will slow down the P2P downloads and give priority to Internet page loads. Once you stop using the browser, the downloads again start full-steam! This can happen even when you start playing multi-player games or making an internet phone/video call. Lastly, since the control is in the hands of the router, it will manage bandwidth for multiple number of computers connected to it. This is needed, as automatic bandwidth management may be available in some download-related apps, but what will you do if the Internet isn't being accessed from the same computer?
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