Product Reviews

For some of us, it's hard to imagine life before wireless networking. Unfortunately, though, most of our homes and offices were built before this time and the wireless signal strength can be patchy or even non-existent in certain areas of the building. If, like us, you've spent many an evening perched precariously on the arm of the sofa trying to get a signal from your wireless base station in the office at the other end of the house, then D-Link's DWL-G710 Wireless Range Extender could be a dream come true.

As its name suggests, it's designed specifically to extend the reach of the signal from your wireless base station. As a single-function device, the DWL-G710 should be the simplest thing in the world to set up. Sadly, the truth is somewhat different. After finding several reports on the Internet of customers in the US (where this product was released last year) who were as flummoxed by the setup process as we were, we eventually managed to get it working - but not before lots of fiddling, tweaking and resetting.

There are two problems: the first is that the

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setup wizard built into the device itself seemed rather flaky and didn't always work as expected. The trick is to make sure the DWL-G710 takes exactly the same station ID and channel as your existing base station.

The second problem concerns IP address setup: despite the manual's in-depth instructions on how to switch your computer between static and dynamic IP addresses (steps are provided for both Windows and Mac users), it fails to explain which you should actually be using in conjunction with the DWL-G710. For the record, you need to switch to a static IP in the same range as the device's default address for setup, and then revert to your standard TCP/IP settings once setup is complete, not forgetting to reassign the device an IP address in the range of the other devices on your network.

Confused? So were we, which points to the main problem with the DWL-G710. This is supposed to be an easy-to-use product, but to get it working you need a considerable level of technical know-how. And if you have that already, why not spend an extra £24 to get Airport Express and set up a more complex, yet more versatile, roaming network?

We should point out, however, that once we had set up, the DWL-G710 worked very well. By placing it halfway between the location of our AirPort Base Station and our upstairs office, which had previously been out of range, we were able to seamlessly connect to what appeared to be our base station (but was, in fact, the DWL-G710) and hence the Internet. It works with both 802.11b and 802.11g networks, and supports WEP and WPA encryption.

So, no more perching precariously, but we wish it had been easier to achieve.