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Connect Your Network With USB

New USB devices offer hot-plugging interchangeability, but they're far slower than conventional adapters.

By Michelle Campanale, PCWorld   

Universal Serial Bus hit the scene with a load of fanfare and a ton of promise. With current-generation PCs generally suffering from a lack of expansion ports, the idea of using only one IRQ to connect a slew of devices had a lot of appeal. As a bonus USB promised that you would no longer have to reboot to add or remove a device. But new desktops and notebooks were shipping with USB ports long before there was anything to plug into them.

Fortunately, that's all changed in the last year. A wealth of new peripherals--from keyboards to scanners to digital cameras--now take advantage of the USB interface. Actually, some peripherals now appearing weren't on the original radar screen at all. For example, Iomega is now marketing its Zip USB drive (see link at right).

Vendors are now also offering ways to connect to a network via USB. Finding this an attractive idea in theory, I decided to see how it actually works. I installed two of the new USB Ethernet adapters in my own home network: Belkin Components' $99 Direct Connect F5U004 USB Network Interface Card and Entrega Technologies' three-port $129 USB Hub With Built-in Ethernet Adapter. The Belkin device is a straight USB-to-Ethernet connection, whereas the Entrega product adds a powered USB hub with three downstream ports. After evaluating both products, I concluded that the Entrega was a significantly better deal. Transfers with the Entrega were twice as fast as with the Belkin--and as a bonus the Entrega added a couple of USB ports to my PC. The Entrega's strong points more than made up the $30 difference in cost. But even the Entrega is not without its tradeoffs: It is significantly slower than PCI, PC Card, and Card Bus network interfaces.

Advantages and Tradeoffs

Both network adapters installed easily on my Pentium MMX-200 desktop system, and each took advantage of Windows 98's USB Plug and Play support. I added both devices without opening up my PC, and each worked instantly without requiring a reboot. Most important, they work with either a notebook or a desktop PC and can be interchanged when necessary--and neither require an additional IRQ.

Since USB network adapters are more expensive and slower than their conventional counterparts, you'll be better off using a standard PCI, ISA, or PC Card Ethernet interface for most installations. These USB adapters would be useful, however, if you lack an IRQ or you don't have any slots available in your PC.

The futuristic-looking Entrega USB Hub is about the depth and width of a floppy disk and an inch thick. The Entrega's LED lights turn green when connected and red when a port is free. I connected the Ethernet port to my home network and then used it to hook up a Logitech PageScan 1.0 USB scanner. A separate power adapter provided the A/C power the hub delivered to the scanner, allowing the scanner to function without needing its own power cord.

Since a network interface alone needs no additional A/C power, the Belkin Direct Connect F5Y004 gets everything it needs from the PC's USB port. The Belkin card is about half the size of the Entrega device. The Belkin's price competes with PC Card or Card Bus network interfaces, although the latter products are significantly faster. The PC Card can handle a broader bandwidth than USB, and Card Bus is faster yet, handling 100-megabits-per-second Ethernet. And PC Card and Card Bus interfaces are typically as easy to set up and install.

Speeds Vary Widely

To compare performance between these products and a conventional PCI card, I timed the transfer of 8.3MB of files and folders from my Pentium MMX-200 to another PC on my network.

As I expected, the conventional PCI 10/100 Base T Ethernet adapter was faster than the USB network adapters, taking just 10 seconds. With the Belkin USB-to-Ethernet product, the same test took 42 seconds, a little over four times as long. The Entrega took 21 seconds, half the time of the Belkin, but still twice as long as my PCI card.

The USB devices didn't make setting up the network any easier, either. I still had to assign IP addresses and gateways to get my computers connected.

The Entrega USB Hub will give you more USB ports, so it's worth buying if you're out of IRQs or slots, or if you want to swap the same network interface between a desktop and a notebook. The slower Belkin product is harder to recommend.