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SOHO Wireless Gateways: Page 2 of 7

Flexible and Secure

SOHO wireless gateways are achieving market success because they give users an easy means for sharing a broadband cable or DSL connection among multiple home users while providing freedom to work from various locations--anywhere within a home or office. These gateways don't typically provide performance levels as high as wired Ethernet, but they are far more convenient and less expensive than pulling Category 5 cable to every room in your home or branch office.

Even the lowest-cost gateways offer advanced network functionality, including DHCP services, NAT routing, stateful firewalls and port forwarding. Wireless security is evolving, thanks to the introduction of easy-to-implement WPA-PSK (Wi-Fi Protected Access with preshared keys), which offers robust security, provided long keys are used. Unlike older offerings, most mainstream products are reliable, with one caveat: Although you might be tempted to buy the latest, greatest, highest-speed turbo model, it's often safer to stick with products that have been on the market for a while. Any problems that may have existed with these offerings are likely to have been corrected by firmware upgrades. If you need the newest features to extend range or meet some unique performance-related application requirement, it may make sense to buy the most recent market entry, but be prepared for troubleshooting.

With the commoditization of basic feature sets, vendors are looking for ways to differentiate, mostly in terms of speed or transmission range. You might be able to find a few 802.11b offerings in dusty boxes on the bottom shelf, but the most common entry point is 802.11g, which offers data rates up to 54 Mbps and effective throughput of slightly more than 20 Mbps. If your primary application calls for sharing a DSL or cable modem connection that delivers a few megabits per second of throughput on a good day, even 802.11g is overkill. However, if you're using the wireless network to support local I/O-intensive applications--perhaps a local e-mail server installed in a remote office--selecting a product that goes beyond existing standards to offer higher performance might justify the added cost.

Some vendors get beyond 54 Mbps by employing proprietary features enabled by the major wireless chipset providers--Airgo, Atheros Communications or Broadcom. Each does an effective job of squeezing more performance out of its systems, albeit in different ways. Airgo's MIMO offerings are the best path to high performance, but only if you're using Airgo interfaces on both ends. If you are using a Centrino notebook to connect to an Airgo AP, the performance benefit is much more modest.