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You probably think you have it pretty good if you've got a DSL or cable line running into your house for high-speed Internet access. You may even be patting yourself on the back for hooking a couple of PCs together with ethernet cabling.

But that's yesterday's news. These days, true home-computing bliss means wireless networking. Pick up your notebook with a wireless PC Card installed, and you're free to read e-mail or surf the Web while lounging by the pool or reclining on the couch. Going wireless has advantages for desk-bound PCs, too: It relieves you of the chore of drilling holes and snaking ethernet wires through walls and floors. That's especially desirable if you're trying to network PCs that are scattered throughout the house. Envision trying to run cable between the work PC in your basement office and another machine in an upstairs bedroom.

Last year, wireless networking took a quantum leap with the release of 11-megabit-per-second products based on the 802.11b wireless standard (commonly known as Wi-Fi) defined by the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance. Previously, wireless adapters operated at 1 or 2 mbps (versus wired ethernet's 10 mbps, 100 mbps, or even 1000 mbps). Eleven mbps may seem like overkill for sharing an Internet connection or transferring a few files over a home network, but new applications like streaming video and shared MP3 audio consume all the bandwidth they can get.

The decision to go wireless is not an open-and-shut case. The effective range of the wireless signal is one issue to consider. Most manufacturers of 802.11b cards claim their products' range is up to about 100 feet indoors, in a typical wood-frame house. But the range can be much shorter in a concrete and steel building. As the wireless signal degrades, performance drops with it. Also, setting up and configuring the network can be difficult.

Setting up a peer-to-peer (computer-to-computer) Wi-Fi network will set you back $50 to $150 for each PCI Card adapter and $50 to $200 for each notebook PC Card adapter. A less expensive networking alternative--phone-line networking products based on the HomePNA 2 standard--costs roughly $40 for each adapter. Phone-line products are faster and often easier to install--provided you have a handy phone jack everywhere you want to put a PC. The flip side: You don't get the convenience of roaming with your notebook. In June last year we compared five phone-line products, and they've changed little since then (see "Home Wired Home").

If you want to share a broadband connection without a host computer acting as server, you can do so with a wireless or phone-line gateway, a product that bridges traffic on a network and routes it to systems equipped with adapters. A wireless access point costs $200 to $400. A comparable phone-line setup can run $300--$150 for an ethernet router, and another $150 for a phone-line bridge.

Finally, slightly less expensive products based on another wireless standard, HomeRF, also compete with those based on Wi-Fi. HomeRF is due for a speed boost this summer (see "Coming Soon: HomeRF 2").

For this review, we put 11 Wi-Fi networking products to the test by setting them up in two homes--a two-story, two-bedroom condominium, and a two-story wood-frame house. We also looked at a comparable phone-line setup using a new product from Netgear, to determine how performance differs between the two technologies. One vendor, 2Wire, offers a product capable of both Wi-Fi and HomePNA networking, and we tested both.

After setting up all the devices, measuring their performance, and examining whatever extras they offer, we gave Linksys's EtherFast Wireless Access Point our Best Buy for its easy installation, wealth of useful features, and affordable price. For beginners and those who don't need roaming capabilities, the Netgear solution could also be a good choice.

Networking Soup

You've probably heard a number of terms bandied about in relation to home networking: hubs, bridges, routers, access points, gateways. Technically, these all refer to specific functions, which are often combined into one physical unit.

A hub typically has several ethernet ports that the various computers on your network can plug into, enabling them to communicate.

A bridge links local area networks, usually connecting sections of a larger network that would otherwise suffer from line length limits, or linking two different types of LANs. For example, the Netgear bridge in this review lets network traffic from computers on a phone-line network pass to systems on a separate ethernet network, and vice versa. We reviewed the Netgear bridge along with a Netgear ethernet router--a device that takes Internet traffic and routes it to one or more computers on your LAN, allowing you, for example, to share a Web connection.

A wireless access point combines router and bridging functions: It bridges network traffic, usually from ethernet to the airwaves, where it's routed to computers with wireless adapters. Finally, a gateway, while a fairly loose term these days, is generally understood to be a device that links a LAN to a wide area network, usually the Internet, and sometimes even includes a built-in broadband modem. All the products in this review are gateways.

As with wired networks, a wireless network includes adapters installed in or hooked to your PCs--PCI cards for desktops, PC Cards for notebooks, or USB adapters that connect to either.

The Contenders

The wireless products we looked at for this review fall into several groups. (For a complete list of products, see the Home Networking Products Features Comparison.) Taking the uncomplicated approach, those from Agere, SOHOware, and Xircom are no-frills access points that merely bridge your wireless network cards to a cabled ethernet network (or to the ethernet port that's in your cable or DSL modem). They also act as basic firewalls, since their Network Address Translation feature prevents outside machines from talking directly to any machine on your home network.

For more flexible network security, 3Com, Buffalo, D-Link, Farallon, Linksys, and MaxGate offer wireless access points with programmable firewalls--necessary if you want to run a Web server on your network, for example, or access Web services such as online gaming. Most of these more advanced units also include 4-port ethernet hubs, so you don't have to buy a separate hub if you have a few wired devices in addition to your wireless ones.

Cayman's DSL Gateway takes things a step further: As its name implies, it's an integrated gateway that bundles Wi-Fi wireless, wired ethernet, and a built-in DSL modem into one unit. And 2Wire's HomePortal combines all three networking technologies--Wi-Fi, wired HomePNA, and ethernet--in one handy box. The 2Wire product is an economical choice for those who want to combine phone-line and Wi-Fi networking.

Other products offer useful extras. The MaxGate unit, for example, has a parallel port to connect a printer, and so acts as a network print server. Linksys also makes a version of its wireless gateway with a print server, although we did not test it.

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