| Product: |
Netgear WG602 |
| Date: |
27/11/03 (1027 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Small, Good Range, Reasonably priced
Disadvantages: None so far
What can I say - they kicked me out of the office. So, having the pleasure of being a "tele-worker" I thought I can get some new toys - and charge the company for them....cool!
With my kids around the place, I wanted to be free to work around the house (wherever they aren't!!) so I thought wireless LAN (as you do). Eyes sparkling with the prospect of new toys I surfed around and found a good deal from BroadBandBuyer.com - £111 for a Wireless Access Point (WAP) plus laptop card delivered. Read some reviews on-line (from the US) and things seemed positive....and did I mention it was relatively cheap?? That's probably why I relate to it so well....
About 36 hours later, lots of boxes arrived. After nearly losing some of my less important digits, I looked down into the box - and found a small and sexy looking thing (Hmm, sounds familiar for some reason?)
Having been taught the acronym RTFM, I did and two minutes later got the Access Point up and running. Another 5 minutes to install the software on the laptop and I was wireless. I then spent about half an hour running around the place seeing how the transmission speed held up. How did it hold up I hear you ask - Excellently is the answer to that. I can sit on the upstairs en-suite toilet (I did say sit) and surf with a full 54 Mbps connection. I even get 48 Mbps surfing at the cooker - never got that connection speed on an Ariston before!!
I set up the encryption using the 128 bit pass phrase - then had to reinstall Windows 2000 on the laptop and lost the pass phrase and couldn't remember it. Things like that happen when you hit 35.....Luckily, with another PC on the system, I could access the configuration page and reset the pass phrase key again (Dohh!)
Netgear say the WAP is easy to configure - it is. Everything done through a web page, accessed through any PC on the network. The transmission range is good considering the small unobtrusive size of the
WAP - about six inches high by about three quarters of an inch wide and about 4 inches deep with a small stubby aerial - but like I said, its what you can do with it...
Had absolutely no problems with the kit at all. A lot easier than running LAN cables over the place and the price of the PCI & Laptop cards are dropping all the time. Thoroughly recommend it..nothing quite like sitting in conservatory, with a cordless phone, picking up emails and sitting in on teleconferences. Commuting, offices? Not with a little Netgear WAP!
PS - You don't want to know where I'm writing this - now wash your mouse!
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