Released into the market only a year ago, these devices integrate traditional NAT (Network Address Translation) routing capabilities with an 802.11b wireless access point. This provides home and small office/branch office users with a cost-effective way to share a broadband Internet connection with a reasonable level of security. Forget about installing UTP cabling. Just attach one of these boxes to a cable or DSL modem, order a few wireless NICs at $89 each--and viola! an instant network. Many products offer integrated 10/100 Ethernet switching, and some include a parallel port that can be used to support a shared printer. A few years ago, you would have needed multiple boxes costing thousands of dollars to get these features. Now, typical retail pricing is $300 to $400, but we've seen street pricing as low as $200 for some of these devices (prices quoted in this article are all MSRP).
Wireless is such a great solution to SOHO networking, it's almost a no-brainer. A September report by the Yankee Group estimates that by 2005, 31.1 million U.S. households will have broadband access. Meanwhile, IDC says that by 2004, 67.7 million American homes--that's 63.4 percent--will own at least one PC, with 30.4 million multi-PC households. Of these, 58 percent will be networking their devices by 2004. Clearly, as wireless makes its way into homes and small offices in a big way, it will stimulate demand for pervasive access. Once users get a taste of untethered Internet access at home, they'll want it everywhere--at the office, in the airport, even at the local Starbucks.
It follows that more IT managers are being pressured both to deploy the technology within their remote-office environments and to recommend specific SOHO products that are compatible with their enterprise networks and supported by their helpdesks. It's from this perspective that we hammered away at 11 products from 10 vendors--the most comprehensive comparative review ever done of these devices. Testing was conducted both at our Syracuse University Real-World Labs® and in my home (my 11-year-old quickly became frustrated by the unscheduled downtime). For details on the testing, see "How We Tested Wireless Gateways".
We tested Agere Systems' Agere Orinoco Residential Gateway, Asanté Technologies' FR3002AL-1PCM, Colubris Networks' CN100 Wireless LAN Router, D-Link Systems' DI-713P Wireless Broadband Router with 3-Port Switch and Print Server, Linksys' EtherFast Wireless AP and Cable/DSL Router with 4-Port Switch and its EtherFast Wireless AP and Cable/DSL Router with Print Server, Nexland's WaveBase, Proxim's NetLine Wireless Broadband Gateway, SMC Networks' Wireless Barricade Router and 3Com Corp.'s Home Wireless Gateway.
Good News, Bad News
Here's the good news--nearly all the products provided a core feature set that met our expectations, and interoperability wasn't much of an issue, despite the fact that many products lack WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) certification ("Breaking Free with Wireless LANs"). With the exception of Agere's Orinoco Residential Gateway, which uses a Java-based utility, all the products offer Web-based configuration and management. SNMP support was available on only two products: Agere's Orinoco Residential Gateway and Nexland's WaveBase. Most did an effective job protecting our network of wireless devices from external attacks, and the granularity of control over security capabilities--ranging from DMZ support to port filtering to access groups--was impressive for products in this price range.
Now for the bad news: Of the 10 vendors whose products we tested, four had to send replacements because their systems were DOA or failed in our lab. In addition, none of the products could match the range provided by enterprise-quality 802.11b access points from Cisco Systems and Symbol Technologies. Finally, with WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) enabled, we saw the performance of many of the products drop by more than 50 percent, particularly for the receive tests. These results are notable given the typical asymmetric nature of SOHO networking, which makes higher demands on downstream bandwidth.
On the other hand, all the products supported sustained throughput in excess of 1 Mbps, making them adequate for most applications. And the cynics may question whether there is much value in enabling WEP encryption in light of recent revelations regarding its vulnerability to attack. (For more on this, see Internet Week's "Security Flaw Isn't the Death Knell for WLANs".)
Diamonds in the Rough
Despite the problems that had us spinning our wheels, we did find a few gems. Our Editor's Choice is Nexland's WaveBase. While the WaveBase is a little more expensive than most of the other products we tested, it stacks up well against the competition in all categories and is the only device to support multiple concurrent VPN sessions. The UGate 3300 by MaxGate gets our Best Value award. It didn't blow away the competition in range or performance, but it sports an excellent feature set and a rock-bottom price. Second-tier favorites include products from Colubris, D-Link and SMC. The Colubris offering is actually the favorite of our test team in terms of features and performance, but the unit's $795 price is more than twice that of the competition.
We also liked the D-Link DI-713P and SMC's Wireless Barricade Router, which share a common system design, but both units needed to be replaced after we encountered problems during testing (the replacement units worked fine). The Asanté, Linksys and Proxim offerings have good feature sets, but several Linksys products were DOA, and Asanté's FR3002AL-1PCM failed to complete our performance tests.
Agere's Orinoco gateway, the product that launched this market, still gets the job done. However, despite a software upgrade that offers new functionality and management, it falls a little short in features and is the only product that doesn't allow Ethernet-attached devices to communicate through the gateway, a big limitation in mixed Ethernet-wireless environments. The 3Com offering is very nicely engineered, but its range is limited and it lacks some security features.
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