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F E A T U R E

WaveBase: A Gateway to Wireless Heaven

October 29, 2001
By Dave Molta

Proxim NetLine Wireless Broadband Gateway

Proxim is one of the early pioneers of the wireless LAN industry, so if dealing with an established player is important to you, the NetLine Wireless Broadband Gateway is a safe choice. This product, originally released by Farallon, which Proxim acquired last year, provides a good set of features and functionality at a competitive price.

The NetLine has an architecture like those of the MaxGate UGate 3300 and one of the Linksys gateways included in this review. The only significant differences we could detect were the NetLine's lack of a parallel printer port, and in the PC Card radio, the LEDs and Web interfaces.

The NetLine's feature set is generally solid, though you can get essentially the same feature set on the Linksys and MaxGate boxes plus a print server for a little less money. However, we found that the NetLine fared slightly better than its two cousins in range and performance, likely attributable to some aspect of PC Card design. In fact, the Proxim product turned in the best performance scores of any product that used the internal PC Card antenna.

Although the NetLine was reliable during normal operation, we experienced one minor glitch. While we were configuring the DMZ feature, the status LED shifted to constant red, and the only way we could recover was to power-cycle the product.

NetLine Wireless Broadband Gateway, $299. Available: Now. Proxim, (510) 346-8000, (800) 613-4954; fax (510) 346-8118. www.proxim.com