For the longest time I ran my home wireless network on a NetGear WAG302 access point. It wasn't particularly fast, but it did A/B/G and had nice antennas that reached most points in my house, and (most importantly) the back yard patio.
But there was one dead spot in a bedroom over the garage, so I began experimenting with WDS to see about covering that dead zone with repeater-redirected wireless. I used Proxim 4000 access points for this. They were nice and small, ran on PoE, and were the same type I was using on a campus network between buildings for a client. All nice. The proxims also were not blazingly fast, but they did the job, and quite reliably too. I provided 2.4GHz wireless to one of my teenagers in the over-the-garage room, and back-hauled the connection to another proxim over a 5GHz link. Yes, it's complete overkill in a house, but this was also a test-bed setup, so I could fiddle with it, and know it well, for application in other places. As above with the NetGear, the proxims were slow. A/B/G wireless with middle-of-the-road coverage, and plodding performance. However, they stayed up. Literally never had to reboot them. They also provided a wonderful array of interesting capabilities - SNMP monitoring and network traffic graphing with mrtg, rogue AP detection, spanning tree, and even mesh functionality. they also had very verbose and detailed logging about nearly everything going on.
Of course, Draft-N came out, and then Full-N was coming up, and my proxims started looking a wee bit old. So I figured I would go with a good thing. So I saved my pennies and got a Proxim 8000 - wow - what a bad move!
The Proxim 8000 has hardly any features compared to the 4000. No WDS, no mesh, no spanning tree, shoddy interface, uninformative logs, to name a few. I could have probably lived without those features, if the thing would actually run for more than a week without needing to be rebooted. About the only good thing about it was that with its oblong shape and 6 splayed antennas, it looked like a face-hugger from the Alien movies. But that doesn't produce happy wireless clients - no sir!
So it's out with the Proxim, and we're back to NetGear. A pair of WNDAP350's are now running my WLAN, and the two of them were barely equal to the cost of the Proxim 8000. I've extended the upstairs one with DLink high-gain antennas. We'll see how it goes....
But there was one dead spot in a bedroom over the garage, so I began experimenting with WDS to see about covering that dead zone with repeater-redirected wireless. I used Proxim 4000 access points for this. They were nice and small, ran on PoE, and were the same type I was using on a campus network between buildings for a client. All nice. The proxims also were not blazingly fast, but they did the job, and quite reliably too. I provided 2.4GHz wireless to one of my teenagers in the over-the-garage room, and back-hauled the connection to another proxim over a 5GHz link. Yes, it's complete overkill in a house, but this was also a test-bed setup, so I could fiddle with it, and know it well, for application in other places. As above with the NetGear, the proxims were slow. A/B/G wireless with middle-of-the-road coverage, and plodding performance. However, they stayed up. Literally never had to reboot them. They also provided a wonderful array of interesting capabilities - SNMP monitoring and network traffic graphing with mrtg, rogue AP detection, spanning tree, and even mesh functionality. they also had very verbose and detailed logging about nearly everything going on.
Of course, Draft-N came out, and then Full-N was coming up, and my proxims started looking a wee bit old. So I figured I would go with a good thing. So I saved my pennies and got a Proxim 8000 - wow - what a bad move!
The Proxim 8000 has hardly any features compared to the 4000. No WDS, no mesh, no spanning tree, shoddy interface, uninformative logs, to name a few. I could have probably lived without those features, if the thing would actually run for more than a week without needing to be rebooted. About the only good thing about it was that with its oblong shape and 6 splayed antennas, it looked like a face-hugger from the Alien movies. But that doesn't produce happy wireless clients - no sir!
So it's out with the Proxim, and we're back to NetGear. A pair of WNDAP350's are now running my WLAN, and the two of them were barely equal to the cost of the Proxim 8000. I've extended the upstairs one with DLink high-gain antennas. We'll see how it goes....
