The eminent cartoonist Sidney Harris once drew a cartoon featuring two scientists. The caption reads "I think you should be more explicit here in Step Two." When you squint at the chalkboard in the cartoon, you see a mess of formulae surrounding the words "Then a miracle occurs."
I'm with the scientist who wrote off Step Two as a miracle. Technology should be full of inexplicit steps. Consumer-level computer products nowadays should plug in and just work. So I was a little disappointed recently when no miracle occurred during my trials of two new wireless networks. I persisted for only one reason: They boasted double the speed of regular 802.11g networks. And under the right circumstances, they delivered on that boast.
The good news
D-Link and Netgear have both introduced 802.11g wireless base stations and PC Cards based on an Atheros chipset with a hidden advantage it calls Super G. This design uses compression techniques, and the ability to use two wireless channels at once helps you reach a nominal transfer rate of a whopping 108Mbps.
In my tests of networks built around D-Link's Xtreme G products and Netgear's WGT624 wireless firewall router and WG511T PC Cards, things proved much faster than on my old 802.11g and 802.11b networks.
Of course, real-life throughput never came close to 108Mbps--it topped out around 26Mbps, but that still beat out Wireless G's real-life rates of 14-to-18Mbps and .11b's scant 5-to-6Mbps. And because most people's Internet connections top out at 1.5Mbps anyway, we're talking overkill anyway--though both Netgear's and D-Link's base stations pepped up my DSL-to-wireless connection about 15 percent with the turbocharged 108 settings engaged.
Both companies' base stations retail at around $130-$150; the matching PC Cards go for around $80. This is a price premium of around 10 or so percent higher than comparable 802.11g rigs--a bargain considering the speed boost.
The bad news
So what, given the good news, was the problem with this miracle speed boost? The trouble came when I tried to incorporate an IBM ThinkPad with built-in 802.11b wireless into the network. It couldn't even find the 108Mbps wireless network for D-Link, and it wouldn't connect to the Netgear one. Even though the new devices are based around what should be a compatible standard (802.11g), the speed-boosting 108Mbps mode messes with that compatibility.
Netgear's product literature 'fessed up to the incompatibility, and the company is promising a firmware fix that should be available by the time you read this. D-Link claims that even in its 108Mbps Dynamic Mode, their products are backward-compatible. But not in my world, they weren't.
Calls to technical support forced me through network settings, something I'd sooner write off as a miracle than see in detail. I waded through IP Config settings--a Windows app that shows the IP addresses of network hardware and default gateway. (Under Windows 98/Me, select Run and type in WinIPCfg; under XP, it's Run, type in CMD, and at the command prompt, IPCONFIG). Then I had to wade through configuration Web pages embedded in both base stations.
For both Netgear and D-Link's products, I had to turn off the zoom-fest 108 mode to hook up my 802.11b notebook. And D-Link's dismissive technical support never did explain why their feted backward compatibility wasn't so--but then again, they refused point-blank to help me with what they called a problem with my notebook. I had to browbeat them into telling me how to set their base station to 802.11b mode manually so that my 802.11b notebook could recognize it. So much for product claims.
A happy ending
However, a miracle did occur in Step Two. Even without turbo mode, I still connected to the Internet about five to 10 percent faster with these products than I had before. So when I browsed more of Sidney Harris's great cartoons at Science Cartoons Plus, I got the joke all the more quickly.
