Linksys WRT54GS-UK

No wireless network's performance ever seems enough. But as soon as 802.11g was ratified, manufacturers started adding proprietary speed improvements. Linksys claims its SpeedBooster technology can provide benefits even in mixed networks where some client adaptors don't have support.

Unlike U.S. Robotics' latest 125Mb/sec benchmark, which is offered as a firmware upgrade for 100Mb/sec owners, Linksys expects you to buy a whole new router to get SpeedBooster. The latter is actually the Afterburner technology developed by Broadcom. Instead of hogging multiple channels as with some speed-enhancement technologies, Afterburner bursts frames, reducing the percentage of bandwidth given over to management information, but otherwise behaves like normal 802.11g.

To test performance, we copied 100MB of files from a desktop client attached to the Linksys via 10/100 Ethernet to a laptop installed with the Wireless-G SpeedBooster CardBus adaptor, model WPC54GS. With the laptop a few feet away from the router, the files took just 24 seconds to copy across, for an average throughput of 33.3Mb/sec. This is far better than the sub-20Mb/sec standard 802.11g normally produces, and beats U.S. Robotics' 100Mb/sec kit. But performance rapidly dropped off with distance. When we moved the client to a room above the router, throughput dropped to 10.7Mb/sec. This is less than the 11.3Mb/sec U.S. Robotics' router and adaptor achieved in the same test, but not by a significant amount, and it's still faster than standard 802.11g.

Aside from SpeedBooster, the Linksys is a fairly standard router. Its features are comprehensive, including MAC address cloning to ease attachment to broadband. There's support for dynamic DNS services such as dyndns.org, plus port forwarding to make PCs behind the NAT firewall visible to the Internet. The built-in firewall enables you to configure access policies and block services or websites. Wireless security can be hardened with MAC address-based access control, RADIUS or PSK WPA and WEP.

The excellent performance of SpeedBooster coupled with its features make the WRT54GS-UK a good choice for new entrants to wireless. But if you already have 802.11g, the extra performance isn't worth throwing out your old hardware.

Author: James Morris