Lucent Technology has re-branded the WaveLan wireless PC Cards as Orinoco concurrent with the rising popularity of wireless home networks. The cards, similar in size to your standard laptop modem card, comes in two flavors Silver and Gold. Silver uses WEP encryption with a 64 bit key, and Gold a 128 bit key. Since the WEP encryption has recently been hacked/proven flawed the choice of keys is not only negligible but provides a false sense of security . While I'm mildly paranoid regarding network security, the higher price for the gold card made me decide on buying two silver cards for $139 each.

Background
The trouble with cutting edge technology is that usually, unless your name is Larry Ellison, said technology does not come with the best human support staff or interface.
Unfortunately for the average consumer since these cards (and the technology itself) was originally designed for the Enterprise business market, the documentation is sparse;
calling Lucent for support is not an option worst of all the supplied drivers simply refused to work.

I had purposely chosen a different manufacturer for my wireless cards than for my access point (see my Buffalo Air Station review at http://nightfall.epinions.com/cmd-review-25CF-45EAAEAF-3A4D0A30-prod3) because I wanted to 'see' that the 802.11b standard was truly interoperable. To this extent the experiment was a complete success...unfortunately
I would have done better using any other vendor when choosing my wireless cards.

Compatibility

Things were supposed to be easy for me in deploying my wireless home network, after all I had quite a few years of networking experience, and the basic idea was to insert
a PC Card into my laptop(s) and be on the network through DHCP. To make the proposal even easier my two laptops one a dell inspiron, the other an IBM thinkpad were both running Windows 2000 which continues the fine tradition (originally introduced in Windows 95) of automatically
detecting hardware recently added to the system.

This feature of windows, became the heart of my trouble. I initially inserted the cards into the laptop, had Windows2000 automatically detect it, and install an appropriate driver. Then I attempted to install the client software which would configure the cards themselves. Unfortunately for reasons which are only clear to God and a sadistic lucent engineer - the client software will only work with the software drivers that are supplied on the CD.

My problem became even worse when I realized that the drivers which shipped with the CD did not support Windows 2000. A quick visit to lucent's website (using a standard connection) provided me with windows 2000 drivers but this also refused to work with the client software. Ultimately
I was unable to get the client software working on my IBM laptop, even after re-moving all drivers, and attempting to install from scratch with the client software first.

I had to resort to coding my own client software for the
cards.

The client software
Why was I so interested in the client software? Well while it is not necessary to use, the client software informs you of relevant link data - such as wireless signal strength, and your packet loss. The further away your wireless card is from a gateway/antenna the poorer the signal. The 802.11b standard adapts by dropping the bandwith available
from 11 to 5..to 1 as your distance increases. Since the client software did not work, the only way I could know I was out of range would be when websites no longer pulled up.

Cost
At the time I obtained the Lucent cards online from Egghead.com for $139 each. They have subsequently
dropped in price to $99 which seems to be par for other competing models. Since all the cards adhere to the basic 802.11b standard, cost should be a prime factor in deciding which card to buy.

Security
The area which Lucent was supposed to shine was in their support for strong encryption. The 802.11b standard has support for an encryption protocol known as WEP (Wired Equivalence Privacy) which comes in a 64bit and 128 bit flavors. Unfortunately WEP has been proven to be insecure/hackable and most enterprise level deployments
would find its authentication and encryption algorithms to be insufficient for their needs. In order to obtain strong authentication/encryption over the 802.11b standard you will have to search for a vendor which supports an encryption protocol (some sort of VPN solution) other than WEP in their wireless product. Lucent's cards only offer support for WEP encryption.


Conclusion
Overall I must say I was disappointed with my purchase of lucent cards. The drivers did not work as shipped
with the CD and still to this date I've not been able to use the client software. In addition due to a fundamental
flaw in WEP, the prime reason for buying lucent (the extra security of 128bit) was mostly negated.


Recommended: No