US Robotics Wireless USB Adapter review

Home networking has been around for a while now, but until recently it involved having lots of cables trailing all over your house.

Wireless networking will rid you of all these - and it's fast, easy to use, and doesn't require heaps of complicated equipment to set it up.

US Robotic's wireless network adapter conforms to the 802.11g standard. This means it can transmit data at a speed of 54 megabits per second (Mbits/s). This is almost five times as fast as older, 11Mbit/s, 802.11b adapters could manage. These theoretical speeds are only possible in the most ideal conditions, but in practice you'll still get around 30-40Mbit/s out of an 802.11g adapter.

To get the best performance out of an 802.11g adapter, though, you must make sure that the device it's talking to is also equipped with an 802.11g chip. A 'g' adapter can talk to a 'b' adapter, but only at the 'b' adapter's slower maximum speed.

The wireless adapter plugs into your computer's USB port. It's small enough to fit in the palm of your hand but still noticeably larger than a typical laptop PC card, or even a Wi-Fi 'key' that plugs into a USB port, like the 3Com OfficeConnect adapter we reviewed last issue. When you also consider that you must carry a cable around for US Robotics adapter, it suddenly looks much less portable than either of these.

However, with this extra size comes (at least theoretically) extra power - meaning extra speed and greater range. In our tests, though, benefits over its rivals were slight. Up close, it managed to transfer our 100MB of test files in 82 seconds. In our long-range test, which puts some walls and doors in the way - it transferred the files in a modest 110 seconds. Our Top 50 Best buy wireless adapter, Kcorp's Cardbus Gold, managed the short-range test in 61 seconds, and the long-range test in 62 seconds. 3Com's Connect Wireless 11g USB Adapter, which is just as flexible as this device but much smaller, completed the short-range test in 69 seconds and the long-range in 112.

The US Robotics wireless USB adapter is a solid piece of kit, that works at reasonable speeds. If you want to add wireless abilities to a desktop PC, though, we'd still recommend using a PCI card as these are much more powerful.

If you regularly switch between a laptop and a desktop, we'd recommend the 3Com's portable key as it's both smaller and cheaper.