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SPEED AND STABILITY PUT VENDOR'S BRIDGELINK WIRELESS BRIDGE IN A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN
Most vendors have a tendency to overstate the performance capabilities of their products, but RadioLAN's claims are justified. The company advertises its Campus BridgeLink Model 347 as a 10-Mbps product-the most modest performance rating among the devices in our tests. But imagine our surprise when the BridgeLink far and away outperformed every other unit we tested. Even without many of the features offered by some of its competitors, including the ability to do point-tomultipoint bridging or IP routing, its simple setup and impressive performance put it on top.
RadioLAN's product consistently yielded wireless transfer rates of 6.5 Mbps to 7 Mbps, second only to Western Multiplex Corp.'s Tsunami. The BridgeLink's next-closest competitor, Cisco Systems' AIR-BR340, gave us an average transfer rate of 5.5 Mbps. The BridgeLink's software also let us do some packet-filtering by protocol (IP, IPX, NetBEUI, and NetBIOS) and provided options to regulate packets that were either accepted or denied by MAC (Media Access Control) address.
The BridgeLink is unique in its design, looking nothing like any of the other products we saw Each bridge consists of two small units: The first has an RJ-45 jack to connect to the network and an RJ-11 serial connection for configuration. The box has an interface that connects to the second unit, which has only an Ntype connector to go out to the antenna. The antennas that RadioLAN ships with the device have a range of only one mile, which is on the lower end of the distance ranges we saw, especially in contrast to BreezeCom's BreezeNet. BreezeCom's product can send packets over distances of up to 15 miles without amplification. We spoke to several users who claimed the BridgeLink can go as far as 30 miles using higher-range antennas and amplification devices, but we were unable to test these assertions.
The BridgeLink's setup gave us no trouble at all. The first step is to run a utility that finds all the bridges connected on the network and lets the user assign an IP address to each.
Once this is done, the program loads the user's default Web browser and connects to the bridge. The Web interface let us configure all...