Product Reviews

It may look like a modern art sculpture, but Asus's WL-ANT150 is actually an external antenna designed to increase your wireless network's transmission range and speed. The antenna can be attached to most wireless routers with removable antennas; it supports RP SMA and reverse RP SMA plugs. If your router has two antennas, you'll need two WL-ANT150s.

The antenna provides a 5dBi signal boost and is omnidirectional, so it propagates the signal improvement in a 360 horizontal arc and 55 vertical arc. As a comparison, most wireless routers come with omnidirectional antennas rated at 2dBi or less, so upgrading

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the antenna can do wonders for your network.

To test we used a generic 802.11g wireless router. At close range using its single antenna, we measured throughput of 19.51Mbit/s; at 10m, the signal dipped to 4.61Mbit/s due to interference. We duly replaced the standard antenna with the WL-ANT150, which screwed into the router with no trouble. At close range, we got a slightly worse result of 19.07Mbit/s, but it's nothing to worry about. At 10m our transfer rate was much better, at 10.11Mbit/s. This is a significant increase in performance and it showed how much cleaner the wireless signal was. However, we couldn't get a signal at 20m.

We tested the same router with Hawking's 7dBi omnidirection antenna, reviewed in What's New, Shopper December 2005. This does a similar job but is a little more powerful. Using that antenna, we recorded 18.64Mbit/s at close range, but a much better 12.71Mbit/s at 10m. We could even get a signal at 20m through two walls, although at 1Mbit/s it was suitable only for web browsing.

While the Hawking antenna remains our favourite choice, Asus's WL-ANT150 is £12 cheaper and a good choice for giving a wireless network a slight performance boost.