Orinco Deal on Deals Page

[phredd]

I'm unfamiliar with wireless networking, so can anyone tell me if 11 Mbps is fast? Will I notice a speed decrease from my cable modem?

Thanks!

[Apex]

http://www.dslreports.com/stest

Test the speed of your cablemodem. I'm guessing it'll be 4mbps or lower. 99% of the cable users in the United States are on slower lines than this wireless system.

[Sandman]

Actually most Cable Modems are only guaranteed a max. dlnld of 1.5MB/s
and upload around .350MB/s. Most of this is done throught the switch to put a limit on the amount of traffic on their network. Some Service providers may allow more, but performance may vary according to the load of users in your network.

You can test your performance here:

http://www.dslreports.com/stest

Also remember you dealing with bits and bytes
lower case b is bits and upper case B is bytes

So a 10Mb/s Ethernet is 1.25MB/s

Remember: 8kbits = 1kbyte
1mbit=128kbytes

[Sandman]

Actually Apex and I got an Orinoco (last year's Silver) about the same time a year ago and have had great results with it used in conjunction with a linksys router before linksys came out with the WAP11 (note most manufacturers use the Lucent now Aegere chipset in their wireless products like Cabletron,IBM,Apple,Dell,etc

You can even upgrade the older series to 128 by getting a gold card and opening it up and switching out silver card, it you want.

Other hacks are availble like making an external antenae out of some old coax and a pringles can to extend the range of your access point.

It is a good product.

If you can wait prices will probably drop more.
Other good deals coming down the pipe is Proxim's harmony WiFi5 series
that supports 802.11a (100 Mbps wireless networking)it is fast, I got a beta running now... It also runs at offers eight (8) non-overlapping channels in the 5 GHz band (5.15 to 5.35 GHz) so you won't get interference with your 2.4GHz Phone, X-10 Video products, your microwave, or all the other consumer products using the 2.4GHz range. It is being featured at Comdex now check it out at:
http://www.proxim.com/products/all/harmony/8570/index.html

Aether Systems is working on offering a 802.11a and 802.11b solution so you can use your existing cards.