Summary
You can think of a wireless access point as a hub that just happens to use radio frequency (RF) transmissions as its “wires.” There are several different types of wireless technologies: 802.11 Ethernet is used for LAN replacement, and Bluetooth is used for short-distance inter-device communication.
802.11 can reliably scale to about 20 or so stations per access point. Both 802.11b and Bluetooth use the same frequency range: the 2.4GHz band, and so there can be interoperability problems, but these usually aren’t terrible if you are willing to put up with shorter distances between nodes. 2.4-gigahertz is pretty crowded, what with certain wireless telephones and even microwave ovens emitting RF in this band. You might have to change channels ...
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