I am writing this from my couch using an Airstation from Buffalo Technology. It is great! I highly recommend this product.

After a long arduous process trying to get the Lucent RG-1000 to work I sent them back and got the AirStation.(see my epinion on the RG-1000 for the full story: http://www.epinions.com/./cmd-review-6991-90B4918-39DE0EAE-prod1 )

After failed product and technical support I decided to call for a little pre-sales help on the AirStation. Well one phone call, answered by - gasp - a real person, I was quickly transferred to another person in under a minute. Ok I am impressed so far. Then the second person was friendly, helpful, informed and intelligent. I quickly determined that yes the standard model, which works as a transparent bridge (wireless hub) was indeed the model I needed based on a quick description of my network topology.

I was confident that if I needed any help, it would be available when I called and that was good enough for me. Now where is that credit card. The next morning the package arrived and I was tearing into a whole new world of wireless.

The main problem I had was that the installation tool did not run well under Windows 2000. I could install both the client manager and airstation manager software, but the configuration tool that finds the base unit and starts talking didn't work. I could see that I had 100% signal strength, but I could not identify the ESS-ID.


I read in the documentation that I could manually put the ESS-ID in the client manager and start talking to the base unit, but it was not labeled anywhere in the documentation or on the unit. Frustrating at best. After about 30 minutes of reading online, and printed documentation, I happened to notice the ESS-ID that was in one of the screenshots of the client manager. Hmmm, that number looks familiar. Ah Ha! It looks just like the MAC address (which is marked on the back of the base unit with a sticker) This ended up being the secret.

The ESS-ID is the last 6 digits of the MAC address that is located on a sticker on the back of the unit and add the word GROUP to it. (ex. 123456GROUP ) Enter this in the client manager under the menu File->Manual and it will connect.

So after about a 45 minute installation process I was home free. I have no touched anything on the unit or software since, and I have been running amok all over my apartment with my laptop sending email here, browsing the web there, and playing my mp3 collection hooked up to my stereo as a digital jukebox at parties.

I have 4 IP's from my ISP and several machines. If you only have 1 IP address as is the case with most cable and consumer DSL packages, Buffalo Tech has an answer for you too. They have models that can handle DHCP from the provide and NAT to hide your whole network behind a single IP address. You can check the website for details, or call the helpful staff there to figure it out. The nice thing is that you can order the one you want and not spend too much time trying to configure it to behave in one of 32 modes that suits your needs.

On top of it all is a pretty inexpensive product only $279 for the base station and $149 for the Lan Card. They even have a new USB unit so you can hook up through USB instead of PCMCIA, but it's not release yet.

The configuration utility only works under Windows, but any IEEE 802.11b card will work with it on Mac, Windows, or Linux. There is a link the the tech support area to a third party Linux driver.

I would definitely recommend buying this product and you can get to their website at http://www.buffalotech.com




Recommended: Yes