Simple pleasures of 54g
I recently switched home broadband providers and decided to use the switch as an opportunity to upgrade my home network’s internals, too.
Centerpiece of my faster setup: Netgear’s WGR614 802.11g Wireless Router. This WiFi cable/DSL-ready router gives me 54Mbps speed for 802.11g devices while maintaining compatibility with 11Mbps 802.11b equipment such as the Nokia 9500 Communicator (Nokia’s first WLAN handset; click here for more details), older WiFi PC cards, etc.
Router specs are available from Amazon or the Netgear datasheet.
Notes on setting up the WGR614 via the provided Web administration interface and recommendations for usage:
- Limit the visibility of your network to casual WiFi users by changing your network name (SSID) to something other than the default and turning off SSID broadcast
- Use the MAC address based access control list to limit access to particular devices
- The router includes stateful packet inspection (SPI) and a number of other security capabilities built-in, but you should always assume your network is vulnerable and being sniffed: Use the highest level of encryption supported by your devices (WEP and WPA-PSK are available in the router), and even better still, use VPN (WGR614 supports IPSec and L2TP pass through)
If you’re interested in the WGR614, you can buy one via Amazon.com for $34.84 USD after a $20 mail in rebate. Be sure you get the latest available revision (when I bought mine, the WGR614 was up to v4).
