Basically, I wanted to be able to use my laptop around the house without laying down CAT5 cable and RJ45 sockets. So, wireless seemed the best idea. After investigating 2Mb/s cards, I decided to go for 11Mb/s. The reason for this was that 11Mb/s has now been ratified as an IEEE standard, and many products are now supporting it. There are also standards emerging (WiFi) for interoperability between vendors. This is great if someone is staying over, visiting, or if you would like to use your PC card in another wireless environment.
So, there were several vendors in my list. Compaq, Lucent and Buffalo. I had a friend who had purchased Compaq and seemed reasonably happy, which is why I was considering this brand. Lucent Orinoco cards had received great reviews elsewhere on Epinions.com, so I thought I would take a closer look. Buffalo, on the other hand, was a bit of an outsider.
However, after having studied online documentation, I found out that the Buffalo cards use the same chipset as the Lucent equipment. This is VERY important for me as I needed support out of a traditional MS Windows environment.
I did not want to purchase a base station, but to purchase two PCMCIA wireless NICs and one PCI bridge. The reason for this is that I wanted to put a PCI bridge + PCMCIA NIC into my Linux gateway, and to use my laptop with PCMCIA wireless card around the house. I could then use IP out to the Internet, and VNC over the wireless LAN to my MS Windows machine upstairs. A nice solution when working from home.
After studying a great number of Linux Wireless HOWTO documents and PCMCIA development sites, it emerged that the Buffalo cards currently use the Lucent chipset and so would work with Linux. I could also use the equipment with Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 if required (you could use Internet Connection Sharing to achieve a similar result to my Linux solution).
So I purchased the Buffalo equipment and am very impressed. It worked out tens of UK pounds cheaper than the Lucent solution (Lucent NICs are hard to obtain in the UK for some reason) and gives excellent transfer speeds. Even when using SSH to remote machines, there is not noticeable latency introduced with the wireless hop to my gateway.
I can thoroughly recommend the Buffalo cards as a wireless solution for both the office and home. We did experiment with the cards in a noisy (in terms of interference and random architecture) work environment, and a very good level of throughput was also obtained.

In the future I may well add a buffalo airstation access point, but not until my home network expands beyond requiring a single wireless client to my gateway.



Recommended: Yes