Let’s talk about something a little more complicated. What if you have a wired network already, and you’re quite happy with the way it’s laid out — you see no point in dismantling it and making it wireless when it works fine as it is. You’ve got this laptop, though, that you’d really like to use wirelessly. Basically, what you want to do is make a wireless connection to a wired network, often referred to as a network bridge.
Well, as luck would have it, there’s a very easy way to do exactly what you want. It’s called a wireless access point.
Going Partly Wireless.
If you’ve got a lot of computers (on an office network, for example) and you can’t switch them all over to wireless networking at once, installing a wireless router is a good way of doing it bit-by-bit. Once the router is part of the network, you could just remove one network wire per day or per week, replacing it with a wireless connection…
Read more in Connecting to a Wired Network Wireless Access Points