Product Reviews

US Robotics' Wireless ADSL2+ Starter Kit provides everything you need to share an ADSL connection wirelessly. The pack contains a wireless router and a USB 802.11g wireless adaptor, both with a clean white finish.

As this is a slightly cheaper product than other routers we've reviewed, you don't get quite so many features. For a start, the router has just a single Ethernet port for connecting a wired PC, not the usual four-port switch. This shouldn't cause problems for most people, and you can always connect a separate switch using a crossover Ethernet cable. You can't upgrade the antenna if you're having trouble with wireless performance, though, because this is permanently attached.

The router comes with wireless turned off, so you have to use the wired connection to configure your settings. While this seems good for security, as no-one can get on your network before you've configured it, it doesn't help. The wizard that

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took us through configuration stopped short of making us turn on encryption.

This means that you have to remember to do it manually, and it's a little tricky to do. Clicking on the WPA link in the management system lets you configure your encryption settings and pass phrase, but it doesn't actually turn it on. Instead, you have to click on the Security link and choose WPA.

The router has all the advanced options that you'd expect, including port forwarding and a firewall. The web interface to change these options isn't as sleek or as easy to use as on US Robotics' high-end MAXg products.

Performance isn't quite as good as we'd hoped, with our Centrino notebook performing worse than with our test router. We were hoping for better things from the USB adaptor, but we got slightly worse scores than with Centrino. This is likely to be because the router and adaptor don't have a turbo mode.

We also ran into some problems getting the adaptor installed on our test notebook. Initially, the installation caused the computer to blue-screen crash and, after a reboot, it refused to start Windows. After starting in Safe Mode and restoring the PC to a much earlier date, we finally got the software installed correctly. We assume that the adaptor's software was clashing with other software on the notebook.

For wirelessly sharing a broadband connection, the ADSL2+ Starter Kit is excellent value. If you want to stream media and share files, though, we'd spend a bit more money and buy the MAXg router.