I have a dedicated cable connection and wanted to share this throughout my house without running wires. The Lucent WaveLAN seemed like a good solution and not too expensive. Here are my reasons for buying this product:

1) Lucent name/reputation and other people's experiences
2) Price - $400 for the gateway + PC card is a reasonable deal
3) Speed - 11Mbs wireless is nice :)
4) Windows CE support - I want to surf from an instant-on, long life device

Well, let me begin by saying that setting up a network, any kind of network, is a complicated task that not everyone is ready to tackle. I have been using computers for over 20 years and do not fear these kind of challenges, but don't appreciate wasting hours getting stuck on stupid problems. This unit is not simple to configure. I would say that a home user should be well versed in how TCP/IP, Proxy servers, DHCP and other networking protocols fit together.

The goal:
I wanted to be able to use my laptop and Windows CE devices wirelessly without having to have my main computer powered up. e.g. I wanted to be able to quickly power up, check the net and power down without having to wait for something to boot nor waste lots of electricity leaving a server running.

The equipment:
I have a Motorola Surfboard cable modem, a 8-port dual-speed 10/100 hub, and the RG-1000.

The setup:
The cable modem is plugged into the "uplink" port on the hub and is able to provide DHCP support without any additional hardware/software. The RG-1000 also plugs directly into the hub (that's why I bought it), along with my 'cabled' machines.

The install:
Getting the drivers/software installed was not the smoothest, but eventually I got everything running. I started on my laptop to make life easy. The speed was great. I was getting 11Mbs at close range (< 50 feet) and about 2-6Mbs beyond 50 feet. I believe the key to making my installation easier is Windows 2000. Microsoft did something right in Win2k as far as network auto-configure. I did not need a proxy server to share my internet connection, nor did I need to do any special configuration. I set my wireless device to use DHCP and it magically finds what it needs to make the connection. I would not recommend trying this on Windows 95/98/Me because you will probably have to reboot your machine too many times. I did fiddle with the network settings several times until I figured out what was needed.

The good:
Everything works very stable. I have left the RG-1000 on for the past 3 months and it has worked flawlessly. It is really great to be able to surf the internet in an instant and at high speed anywhere in my house.

The bad:
This is a 2.4Ghz spread spectrum device. Unfortunately I also have a 2.4Ghz spread spectrum phone. When using the cordless phone, the network is killed except at very close range. I guess I need to switch back to a 900Mhz phone.

Lucent seems to be the best company as far as device driver support for the PCMCIA card. Not only does it run in every normal Windows machine, but I having it running in an old CE HPC (Vadem Clio) as well as a new HP 720.

Final analysis - I would recommend this to anyone wanting to free themselves from wires and who has some network configuration experience.




Recommended: Yes