Linksys Wireless-G Broadband Router

In the nefarious world of Wi-Fi standards 802.11b is still king, despite its low bandwidth of only 11 Mb/s. The competing 802.11a standard offers up to 54Mb/s, but apart from some dual standard supporting hardware, it has not received the support expected thanks to the prominence of 802.11b and general lack of interoperability between the two.

In the nefarious world of Wi-Fi standards 802.11b is still king, despite its low bandwidth of only 11 Mb/s. The competing 802.11a standard offers up to 54Mb/s, but apart from some dual standard supporting hardware, it has not received the support expected thanks to the prominence of 802.11b and general lack of interoperability between the two.

Because of this the draft 802.11g standard is the basis for Linksys' new range of Wireless-G products. The 802.11g has the benefit of being backwards compatible with 802.11b while being capable of delivering 54Mb/s bandwidth. This capability is a cornerstone of Linksys Wireless-G Broadband Router, combining with a four port 10/100 Ethernet switch and a Router to share your connection.

Setup is simple, plug in the devices, switch them on and fire up a browser so that you can access the configuration pages via a web interface from one of the wired PCs on your network. Setup will vary depending on your ISP but for OptusNet cable it really was just plug and play. You also configure the Wireless Access Point, including those all important WEP security settings, through the browser which is a straightforward affair.

With PCs running default Windows XP network settings, detection of the network and the web that lay beyond was a doddle, working reliably from boot. If the PC had other settings then a quick rerun of the windows networking wizard was enough to get everything running smoothly.

In fact our only real worry with the Wireless-G was the draft nature of the standard. While backwards compatibility with 802.11b seems to guarantee the future success of 802.11g, recent shenanigans with DDR memory and AGP 8x has made us wary of products that adopt standards before finalisation. For a home network the issues are much less than a corporate deployment, but there are often minor annoying glitches that appear down the track once products based upon a ratified standard emerge.

The Linksys Wireless-G is a great little home networking product; when the standards get ironed out it could well be the unbeatable all-in-one solution for our home networking needs.