I got a pair of these cards after I saw someone recommend them on slashdot as cheap wireless cards that work under Linux. Cheap is definitely the right word to describe the Webgear wireless cards, for better or for worse.

First the pros: For $150 you get 2 PCMCIA cards AND 2 ISA adapters so you can run the PCMCIA cards in your desktop computer. And unlike regular (wired) 10baseT, these cards don't require a hub to hook up more than 2 computers. So you can do any combination of laptop->laptop, desktop->laptop, or desktop->desktop all for $150. Compared to every other wireless solution I could find on the market, this is a pretty sweet deal. I wanted to get some Lucent Wavelan cards, but not only did I have trouble finding a place that sold them, the list price on them was something in the range of $200-300 per card. I've been running these cards for almost a year and once they are setup, they run just fine. I live in a two-story house with thick walls and I can use my laptop anywhere in the house, including the backyard, and I get great connectivity to the other computer downstairs. The card claims throughput up to 2Mb/s, but I generally get about 1Mb/s, which is perfectly fine for everything I need it for.

Now the cons: To get these cards working with one machine running Linux and the other running Windows took me at least 2 hours, and I consider myself a Linux and networking professional (I've been running Linux for 6 years and was a network engineer for 3 years). Now I can blame some of that on the minimal documentation for the Linux drivers, but the Windows software that came with the cards wasn't the most user-friendly either. If you are someone who runs Windows and isn't very comfortable installing new hardware and drivers, I wouldn't recommend these cards for you as some tweaking to get them working is required.

I recommended these cards to my friend who wanted to set up a LAN in his house with several machines and he ended up getting a broken card. He bought 4 cards and 3 of them worked fine together, but the fourth would stop working off and on. I haven't had any problems with mine, but I am running only 2 cards at once, so that might have something to do with it.

I had another friend who wanted to connect two apartments in an apartment building that were two floors apart. These cards claim they can work 1000 feet in open air and 500 feet through walls, but don't count on it. You could actually see one apartment from the other by looking out the window and the distance through the walls and floor from computer to computer was less than 100 feet. We tried for hours to get the cards working to no avail. We even moved both of the computers right next to the windows to minimize obstructions before giving up.

So in summary, there is setup time required for these cards no matter what OS you run, the cards can't do everything they claim, but they are really cheap and once you get them set-up, they work great.







Recommended: Yes