With an invisible fence, a barking dog runs right up to an unseen barrier and stops cold. Underground is a ropelike antenna that defines a perimeter and shocks the pet if it attempts the cross the boundary. Our Clear Choice Test of Newbury Networks' Newbury Location Appliance found it has a similar effect on wireless traffic. The wireless location-tracking product uses radio frequency to define the boundaries of the network and identify wireless assets.

NLA works with a much larger variety of popular access points than previous products from Newbury. We used it to build an invisible boundary inside of a midsize office floor in an area that has enormous amounts of surrounding-area Wi-Fi activity.

With a little bit of setup and training (called fingerprinting), we achieved a clear boundary using the appliance and were able to track Wi-Fi gear traveling across a digital map of the office area. Overall, it's a fascinating combination, although it takes a bit of work to integrate.

For an extra cost, you can add Newbury's WiFi Watchdog software to disable objects when they move out of defined boundaries, called locales. The device also provides a locations API for feeding data to a wireless location-tracking platform from Newbury or other third-party applications.

Inside the rack-mounted box is an Intel Xeon twin-CPU system running the Linux 2.6.16 kernel. Initial setup had us dragging out a serial cable to get a terminal connection to the unit, but the rest of the setup comes from either a Web browser or a Java Run-time Environment application connection over Ethernet that runs on Windows XP (we had trouble with Vista), MacOS (10.4.9) or Linux.

WIRELESS NEWBURY LOCATION APPLIANCE Newbury Networks

4.0

Price: $1,500 Pros: Highly effective Wi-Fi perimeter fence; easy to use once set up. Cons: May require temporary installation Wi-Fi site downtime; lacked some documentation. The breakdown Security 20% 3.5 Scoring Key: 5: Exceptional 4: Very good 3: Average 2: Below average 1: Subpar or not available Administration 20% 3.5 Management functionality 40% 4.5 Setup/integration 20% 4.0 TOTAL SCORE 4.0 Check out our Wireless Buyer's Guide

Click to see: NetResults for Newbury Location Appliance

After a 30-second setup via the serial cable, life got easier, and we were able to use HTTPS, LocalePoint Manager application or a Secure Shell session back to the original terminal interface.