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D-Link, Belkin top our early wireless tests
The lack of a final standard hasn't prevented an early crop of 802.11g wireless LAN products (54M bit/sec, 2.4-GHz frequency) from coming to market. We obtained seven prestandard access points and put them through their paces. This gear is pointed largely toward home and small business markets, and the product features show it. This first group is far faster than pure 802.11b, yet slows quite a bit when 802.11b clients try to access them. They show promise, but our results will change when a final standard brings compliant firmware upgrades.
We tested products from Apple, Belkin, Buffalo Technology D-Link Systems, Linksys, Netgear and SMC Networks. Buffalo's products hit our doors first - and, like many of the participants, the company followed up with several CDs or fat firmware files worth of revisions in the three months after products were released.
The D-Link DI-624 and Belkin's 54g products win our Blue Ribbon Award - Belkin's installation, management and performance were very good, and in terms of raw performance, D-Link's DI-624 was positively blazing - outdistancing the competition.
But are any of these products ready for production deployment? The answer is mixed. With the 802.11g specification still in draft form - it's unlikely that any of the products reviewed will have the same firmware after the final specification is agreed upon this summer. All these products are upgradeable, but it's difficult to tell how the changes will affect performance. At the time we conducted our test, the products lacked support for the upcoming Wi-Fi Protected Access specification (see "Securing 802.11g," page 46), so high security is up to third-party authentication schemes.
Speed and range
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 (See "The 'Frankenstein' spec," page 46).
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...