What Is An Access Point?

| Definition | Technically speaking, you don't need a access point to build a small wireless LAN. If you set your wireless network adapters to use "ad hoc" mode, each of your computers can simply communicate with each other peer-to-peer. That works great until you need to connect to a wired network or until you add too many clients and flood the LAN with traffic. Access points support the much more flexible "infrastructure" mode.