* Bountiful Router offers generous range, stingy management features.
Bountiful Router offers plentiful wireless range
By Tom Henderson
The Bountiful WiFi Router’s claim to fame is its signal strength. The company’s founder, David Egbert, started a company that developed Linksys’ Wireless Signal Booster, an item that is very popular (we often use one in our labs). In testing the Bountiful Router, we found a feature set similar to many other business-class Wi-Fi routers.
But unlike other routers we’ve tested, the Bountiful Router’s signal strength (and receiver sensitivity) expand the radius normally thought of for 802.11b/g service. However, the lack of useful documentation, configuration options and potential security issues marred our overall impression of the device.
We received two units that look very much like every other Wi-Fi access point/router we’ve seen – a box with two antennas and ports on the back for additional switched connections. We connected the routers to our Gigabit Ethernet network.
Once installed, a very sensitive radio receiver matched the 1-watt output of the Bountiful Router (through its twin antennas). This means that the strong Wi-Fi signal that the unit generates can be “heard” for a long distance, and the Bountiful Router is still able to hear client signals from comparatively far distances. The added power of the router became very appealing before our radiological testing, and the sensitivity of the receiver means that our axial Wi-Fi range was mightily extended. The router started to interfere with neighborhood access points frequently and demonstrably – we received supplicant association attempts from Wi-Fi clients more than 600 feet away.
To read the remainder of Bountiful WiFi Router’s test results, as well as detail on how the test was conducted, see: http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2005/103105-bountiful-test.html?rl
