* The Reviewmeister talks about some of the new 802.11g wireless LAN products he got his hands on
The Reviewmeister is a wireless LAN junkie, so we couldn’t wait to get our hands on the new crop of 802.11g wireless LAN products. Heck, we don’t care if the standard hasn’t been finalized. If there are pre-standard products out there, we want to get our hands on them.
Because 802.11g uses the same radio spectrum as 802.11b and also provides optional backward-compatibility with 802.11b, 802.11g is perceived as the successor to 802.11b.
The draft specification provides for speeds up to 54M bit/sec, but in testing we found on average about 14.97M bit/sec of speeds. The difference between the gross speed and our average results is similar to the differences seen in 802.11a and 802.11b products – signaling overhead eats up a large fraction of performance (roughly more than one-third off the top). The data rates with 802.11g can be blazing compared with 802.11b.
D-Link Xtreme G DI-624
D-Link’s Xtreme G is an access point and four-port router that can be set up from a browser interface or CD. There is a choice of a setup wizard for the nontechie and another method with advanced settings.
Xtreme G had the fastest throughput of the access points we tested – on average about 24.73M bit/sec, with a peak of 26M bit/sec (albeit with a Buffalo client card).
Security isn’t strong on the list of features, although it includes Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) (64- and 128-bit encryption); filtration of users by media access control or IP address; port blocking; time-of-day access by MAC or IP address; and URL and domain blocking.
A rudimentary “firewall” also can be used to create admit/ deny rules based on traffic behavior but falls short of stateful packet inspection and preset rules-based firewall applications.
Xtreme G had the largest usable radial air space range of all the access points tested in pure 802.11g mode, but it wasn’t the fastest in the 802.11b/g mixed mode measured with 802.11b clients. However, this access point had strong raw speed and range – both strongly desirable characteristics.
Linksys WRT54G
The Linksys WRT54G access point and four-port switch/router uses a CD-based wizard for setup, and also can be set up via a Web browser. The wizard was good at guessing the network infrastructure of our lab.
The WRT54G doesn’t contain any strong firewall features. Security consists of WEP, MAC-layer access control lists, filtered ports, time-of-day access by MAC, and VPN pass-through support for Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol and IP Security-based LANs.
The device has excellent performance, and the performance was consistent across all our tests. In fact, it did best in mixed mode (802.11b/g).
For the full report, go to https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2003/0512rev11g.html
