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Linksys WRT-54g 802.11g Wireless Router
Ernest Lilley 05/19/03

(For more information on this product, see my 05/03 Unleashed Column at Byte.com)

Simple installation and reverse compatibility to the earlier 802.11b Wi-Fi standard are plusses for this wireless router, but until the 802.11g standard is approved, it's a chancy investment.

Model: Linksys WRT-54G Product Website / Spec/PR / Availability: March 2003 / MSRP: $220.00 Amazon Price $129.00

Among the current crop of 802.11g Wi-Fi routers, Linksys's WRT-54G appears to be a hot item. Even though it's still a bit early for serious investment in 802.11.g products (See the IEEE report on 802.11g) we wanted to start trying some out to see if the combined benefits of  54 mbit/sec bandwidth and increased range were worth the upgrade.

Installation is simple under XP home, and the unit had no trouble finding our Motorola Surfboard (SB4100) cable modem by using the Setup CD-ROM and letting it scope out the system.

My 802.11b laptop had no trouble finding the signal, and its coverage seemed to be about what I normally get in my brick fortress. Adding in a Lynksys  802.11g PCMCIA card on another laptop let me try a mixed network with 802.11b, g, and 100 Base-T, all of which worked fine.

While the extra range offered by 802.11g did appear to help out, it wasn't a simple cure for my EMF challenged home office, and I found myself dropping the signal on the same floor of the brick two story.

While the extra speed is handy for major file transfers, if all you want to do is surf the web, bear in mind that a cable modem only provides about 2 Mbps, and the 802.11b standard beats that fourfold with its 11 Mbps throughput. If you want to use this for your SOHO setup and you've actually got more than one computer going at the same time, this may be the way to go.