|
Netgear 802.11g 54Mbps Wireless PCI Adapter
Netgear (
12 August, 2003 )
Electronics |
| Our
Price |
: |
£
41.34 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Prices
subject to change. |
usually dispatched within 24 hours. |
| |
|
| |
|
Netgear PCI WG311  |
|
Fantastic piece of Kit, far better than the belkin version which would only connect at 11Mbs despite calling itself a 54G card!! Took 5 minutes to fit and configure and now my wireless network is blisteringly fast at 54Mbs all the time.
|
Faultless electronically, just needs a better antenna  |
The Netgear devices are rapidly becoming the industry standard for wireless devices, the installation of most of their hardware is moderately simple and the tools and monitoring software is pretty self-explanatory.The only slight downside is the limited range of the antenna. If you’re practically sitting on top of your access point (the device you are connecting to) then it will be OK. The rather under-sized 2dB omni-directional antenna will have a clear line of site range of 100m – pretty good you might say, until you realise the a single brick wall may reduce that by 90% to 10m. Two brick walls and you will be relying on the complex patterns of radio constructive interference to get a good signal – and a prayer might help! So you may well be buying a 54Mbps 802.11g card and only ever achieving 2Mbps because the signal is just so weak. As this is a desktop device, you may find that investing in a 5-6dB directional radio antenna the tonic to making your wireless experience a whole site more pleasurable. After all, it’s advisable to focus the power that your Netgear card generates towards the access point instead of the omni-directional antenna which sprays the signal in all directions wasting the majority of the power. [By the way, dB is a logarithmic scale, so you will be increasing the radio signal considerably by going from a 2 to a 5dB antenna.] All that said, without a reliable and easy-to-use wireless network interface card such as this you won’t be going anywhere! This is a good mainstream purchase for a desktop system.
|
|
This card surpassed my expectation |
I just upgraded my sons PC. My old SMC USB adapter would not work even the Windows XP Pro says it is working fine. Since I have all Netgear stuff in my home network and work great, I looked at Netgear "stuff" first for the replacement. I wanted to try a different interface; via PCI vs. USB.After reading some reviews on MA311 card I gave it a shot on this card for future upgradability. since all Netgear "stuff" requires to install the drivers and utility prior to installation, I did, and wow, I thought my old SMC USB adapter was pretty good on my sons old Dell, but this card surpassed my expectation. It was picking up a couple of more my neighbors access points I didnt see before, and getting full 11MB/s connection from my MR814 with 128-bit WEP. The utility have much better interface from my MA401 cards. And this is something definitely worth the money. Being a realy picky bargain hunter, I did not mind at all for paying the full price on this card. Cant wait to find a good deal on 802.11g AP and try its full speed.
|
|
