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The Ultimate Wireless Guide

We gather the best gear for setting up or improving a Wi-Fi network, and offer advice on how to add a printer, hard drive, stereo, and even a TV to your network.

Becky Waring

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3Com U.S. Robotics 56K V.90 Faxmodem ISA INT

Top 5 Wireless Kits (chart)

We asked all of the major vendors to send us a wireless kit, composed of a router and enough adapters (PCI, USB, or PC Card adapters) to get at least one desktop PC and a notebook PC connected. We then tested the routers and all of the submitted adapters; if a vendor supplied more than two adapters, we picked the two fastest to make our kit.

Our testing was done in an electromagnetically enclosed environment to avoid interference from other wireless networks, and we tested both uploading and downloading through both a simulated Internet connection and a Windows networking environment. We also tested the time it took for a conventional TCP/IP ping to reach a gateway system. All of these tests were repeated several times.

This testing was done using the default configuration of the products, and using the highest possible form of encryption and the fastest mode. Some parts of the kits don't support the highest encryption settings and wireless speed--in particular, some of the USB devices don't support WPA encryption or the enhanced 802.11g modes that other adapters do. In those cases, we used the highest supported settings when testing that adapter. For all of the products, we downloaded the latest drivers and firmware--something we recommend all users do as well, for both security and performance.

The kit price is the combined cost of the router and the two listed adapters. Some vendors do not offer a full range of adapters, and other adapters were not available: D-Link, for instance, was not able to supply an 802.11g USB adapter in time for testing. Two kits tested (from Actiontec and IOGear) didn't make the chart.

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