Belkin's 54g Wireless Network Access Point

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Manufacturer: Belkin
Price: Compare prices here
Requirements: Installed 54G/802.11b Ethernet adaptor, browser, CAT5 cable, TCP/IP
Web Site: WWW.BELKIN.COM

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A WHILE BACK we reviewed a Linksys WAP and separately a 54G wi-fi card. Now we've had a chance to look at a Belkin Wireless network access point and retrofit it into the INQ network.

THE BOX
The little grey box claims to support up to 32 users, has a power socket, a 10-BaseT RJ45 port, and three little LEDs at the front which tell you if you've remembered to switch it on, and which wink when you've successful wireless connections. It supports, as the name suggests 802.11g and 802.11b, and supports CSMA/CD, TCP, IP, UDP, AppleTalk and client DHCP protocols.

The G function is supposed to give you coverage of 300 feet indoors, in radius and over 1,500 feet in radius outdoors. That means, in theory, that we ought to be able to go stroll into a park not far from here, and smurf the Interweb. We might do that tomorrow, it's a bit cold here today, and the light is beginning to fade.

SETUP
We found that installing the slim grey Belkin box, with its two little wireless aerials, a lot easier than the Linksys WAP, which took us a few weeks to secure, giving unrivalled wi-fi access to our next door neighbours during that time.

Basically, you plug the grey box using an Ethernet cable into your existing router, and the only real work then is to configure your wi-fi clients to work with the system.

To start doing that, you access firmware that's inside the grey box, and set up the encryption and password that you need unless you want to give your neighbours 802.11g capabilities.

The browser interface is easy to use - you can choose between setting 64- or 128-bit encryption, either letting the software do that for you or by typing in your own strings of hex.

A quick save to disk of the configuration settings, and to get it going all you need to do is then configure your clients. How you do that depends on what OS you're using. But if you are playing the Windows XP game, there's a pretty useful page on the Microsoft support site, here, which will help you set up the host and the client.

BINGO
We're using a mixture of 802.11g and 802.11b in the wi-fi setup we've got here. The 54G claims to support both, and certainly it recognised both the Centrino machine we tote around with us, the Linksys 802.11b cards we've got, and the Belkin 54G card we reviewed earlier this year.

CONCLUSION
This box will let you build a reasonably powerful wi-fi network and if you've already taken the plunge and bought some 802.11g cards, you'll get better throughput and a wider range than the existing 802.11b WAPs.

We found the setup was far easier than the Linksys WAP 11 we reviewed a while ago, and didn't involve nearly as much messing round with pesky IP numbers as that did.

Recommended. And like we say, we'll venture into the park with our notebook tomorrow and see just how muddy we can get our boots before we're unable to smurf the INQ's pages. µ

* SUNDAY Made the trek into the park, about 80 metres from the wi-fi gizmo. Very nice blown down leaves, but wi-fi no luck. Got some strange looks from punters walking in park, however. Managed to make the thing work at 30 metres max - but it is in a house, separated from the outside world by a wall, a window, some books and a PC. Worked at the bottom of the garden though - about 30 yards away. But signal down to 2Mbps. Pic shows this Belkin review before we added it to this article.