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Our Editors' Choice, the Lucent Orinoco AP-1000, showed mediocre performance. Anecdotal testing indicates that it suffers greater performance degradation with WEP encryption enabled (16.8 percent degradation) than does the Aironet 350 (0 percent) and the Symbol Technologies products (the 3Com, for example, suffered only a 9.4 percent degradation). According to Lucent, the Orinoco AP-1000 will show this behaviour at high loads and when connected to the clients at the 11Mbps rate. The 40-bit consumer-class product, the D-Link DWL-1000AP, showed the highest throughput.
We performed extensive interoperability tests among all vendors at the highest possible level of encryption. After some modifications, we achieved encrypted wireless communications in all products tested. Additional details on testing as well as our extensive interoperability throughput performance results and analysis may be found in our online edition. To measure throughput, we used Chariot 3.2 from NetIQ (www.netiq.com) and its filesndl test suite, with the clients simultaneously downloading uncompressible data from the server for a two-minute interval. The scores shown depict the mean of three consecutive tests.
In the small-office category the decision was much easier. The D-Link DWL-1000AP and wireless PC Cards were clearly the best in this category. We found the D-Link access point to be the best-engineered, best-designed, and top-performing product we reviewed. The D-Link access point also contained the most feature-rich products, and it's the least expensive. And finally, the D-Link product offers centralised management for multiple APs, as well as excellent and fast installation software.
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