US Robotics Wireless Turbo Access Point & Router review

This device from US Robotics is designed to share a broadband Internet connection between PCs on both wired and wireless networks.

It works with both ADSL and cable Internet services, and the company claims it will provide speeds equivalent to wired networks when used in conjunction with Wireless Turbo networking cards. In addition, it'll work with any standard wireless card that supports either 802.11b or the newer 802.11g standard.

The device has four Ethernet ports to connect PCs using regular, wired network cards. Another port connects to the ADSL or cable modem. Security features include 256-bit WEP encryption and the ability to lock out PCs that don't have specific MAC addresses. A copy of Norton Personal Firewall 2003 is also included, and a firmware upgrade for the WPA security system (Wi-Fi Protected Access) is promised in the future, providing higher security levels than WEP encryption alone.

The router was easy to set up, and worked with our collection of 802.11b and 802.11g cards, as well as a US Robotics Wireless Turbo PC Card, which costs £41 (£48). The Turbo card performed better than our old 11Mbit/s 802.11b Netgear card, turning in a transfer rate of 6Mbit/s, compared to 4Mbps. A fairly new 54Mbit/s Netgear card performed better, managing 6.75Mbps - a figure that virtually matched the standard 10Mbit/s wired network card we use as a benchmark.

If you want wireless networking and Internet sharing in your home or office, and need to reduce the number of boxes you have plugged into the mains electricity, then this is a great choice. It's easy to use, is able to automatically assign IP addresses to the PCs in your network, and supports useful features such as DMZ and 'port forwarding', both functions that allow services on your PC to be accessed via the Internet - in the case of DMZ, without compromising the security of your network.

Author: Simon Edwards