Benchmarking and thoughts
Testing was carried out three times. The lowest and highest results were discarded.Firstly, Test 1. This involved testing in the same room with no obstacles between Wireless card and AP.
A quick note on speeds now. The 54g standard has a theoretical, and that's the important part, maximum speed of 54Mbps (Megabits per second). In other terms, that boils down to 6.75MB/s (Megabytes per second). Sound pretty good on paper. However, it's literally impossible to achieve anything near peak, theoretical performance with any brand of card and AP. The 17.7Mbps, which is around 2MB/s, is actually reasonable going from a 54g combination. You wouldn't think that one-third possible performance is anything to be excited about, but that's about as good as it gets without extra boosting from brand-only Turbo modes.
WEP-enabled performance is surprisingly good, with added security only imposing a small performance hit. In fact, one wouldn't be able to differentiate between non-WEP and WEP-enabled performance without recourse to data transfer speeds. 802.11b performance comes in at almost half its theoretical limit. We can say that 802.11g is around 3x as fast as 802.11b in this instance.
Test 2, carried out further away and with a ceiling in between the cards and AP, shows a slight drop in performance for all concerned. One of the chief uses of Wireless connectivity has to be high-speed internet usage. Even 802.11b is good enough to run a 5Mbit line without too much difficulty. 802.11g will manage almost 2MB/s at this distance. Again, WEP has a little performance hit.
The hardest test is one where internal and external walls combine to slow the radio signal down. The utility still reported a connection speed of 54Mbps at most times, but transfer speeds were anything but. We must note that at no time did the iNexQ duo lose connection during the transfer. If Wireless use in your garden, assuming it's not the size of a small town, is your thing, we can't forsee too many problems with it. Modern offices often adopt an open-plan design, so the range should be good enough for most buildings.
A final test was to see how far we could take the laptop and still maintain a useable signal to the AP. Walking with a largely line-of-sight method away from the AP, the signal began to become, quite expectedly, progressively weaker the further we went. It was still perfectly useable up to 200m away. However, it must be noted that a number of a trees interfered with a direct signal.
Final thoughts
The world of networking, especially without wires, is often a dark and mirky business for the typical PC user. A firm's first objective is to make it as easy as possible; literally plug and play. To its credit, both of iNeXq's products worked correctly without any need for tampering by the user. Getting to the advanced configuration section of the Access Point was a little more taxing than it should have been, a matter not helped by the instructions that assume a level of networking competence. DHCP, subnet, gateways, and TCP/IP may be as clear as day to some of our readers, but we'd bet that most people looking for an introductory Wireless connection could do without the jargon.
The transfer speeds, whilst way short of theoretical performance, were largely in line with what we'd expect from a decent 54g outfit. Transfers were smooth with no dropped connections and we maintained a Wireless connection for an entire day without any problems. The bottom line is that it works - and works well. Configuration menus and the adapter's bundled utility are both simple and easy to use.
So if you're looking to rid yourself of the shackles imposed by wires the iNeXq is a good a starting point as any. Suggested pricing puts the Access Point at around £85 and the accompanying PCMCIA adapter at £50. As with most things, once you've used it, you are simply loathed to go back to the traditional system. We'll refrain from awarding a rating until we've tested solutions from other manufacturers.
