Netgear; good reliable big name brand, you wish! (Netgear MA311)

Member Name: Siswell

Product:	Netgear MA311
Date:	24/04/05 (151 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: y one!reless products are just poor

Disadvantages: Poor signal strength, Unreliable connection, Netgear wireless products are just poor

Netgear are one of the big players in the home computer world and have had a good history of delivering top of the range cards at very reaonable prices. How unfortunate it seems they got the temp guy to do there wireless range :(

This card runs at the standard 11MBps speed (which is actually slower than the cable 10MBps, don't ask me why as i'm not to sure but its a case of dividing the wireless speed by about 4 to get the cable equivelent) However this card has an amazingly poor signal so poor infact that even if you have two computers with these cards in the same room and less than a metre apart they sometimes fail to find each other. Add to the fact this card also has the nice habit of loosing the signal after you've found the other computer you will start to realise why i binned it. The only way to make this card semi stable is to attach a massive external ariel to it which general cost more than an actually decent card. At one time i was trying to get this card to work with Netgears 54MBps router but was also having very similar problems as their router is also very shoddy. What really annoys me about this product is that my friend has a very similar set up but when with D-Link items instead and his works perfectly all of the time.
Moral of the story; Netgear have seriously dropped the ball on their wireless products and have pushed stuff onto the market which just isn't ready. Would love to know how they worked out the "range" specification on this product as it says upto 100 metres if only i could get 1 metre reliably . . .

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