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F E A T U R E

WaveBase: A Gateway to Wireless Heaven

October 29, 2001
By Dave Molta

MaxGate UGate 3300 Cable/xDSL

MaxGate provides a great combination of brains and beauty. The UGate's feature list is not the most comprehensive of the products we reviewed, but it does include the essentials and a few nice extras, including a shared printer port, support for dynamic DNS (through TZO.com) and an excellent suite of security features. The UGate 3300 is also the only product we tested that includes URL filtering. We found the Web-based configuration and management interface intuitive and functional, and the system survived all our tests without a problem.

If range is a major consideration, you can find offerings that do better, but the UGate 3300 made a respectable showing. Likewise, while performance with WEP disabled was near the top of the list, client-receive performance with WEP enabled was not. For most cable modem-, DSL- and T1-attached networks, this lack of performance doesn't represent a significant bottleneck to Internet access (your external Internet connection is more likely to be a performance constraint), but if you have lots of internode traffic on the internal wireless LAN or a very high-speed Internet connection, the performance bottleneck could be noticeable.

Unlike some of the products we tested that offer multiple switched 10/100 Ethernet ports, MaxGate includes just one port for the WAN connection and one for the local network. Thus, if you want to connect more than one local Ethernet-attached device, you'll need to attach a hub or switch to this port.

UGate 3300 Cable/xDSL, $279. Available: Now. MaxGate, (800) 284-8985; fax (510) 490-1590. www.maxgate.net

Note: At press time, the vendor MaxGate was unresponsive. We were unable to determine its status as a business and advise our readers to contact the company directly if so inclined.