I have my DSL connection in my home office. My daughter wanted to use her laptop wireless about 20-25 feet away from the bridge. The signal that she receives is the weakest possible. I've twisted the antenna's but with no luck. For the signal to reach her laptop, it must go through about 2 walls. Her room is the closest to my office, and I'm afraid if I don't ante-up and buy an 802.11a router that I'll never get complete wireless networking in my home.

Being cost conservative (especially since I'm hardwired most of the time), I'm going to return this and try the Netgear wireless. I currently have a Netgear dsl/router and that has worked great (although their firewall software is only for digit-heads).

So, if you're in a situation where you don't have to deal with too many walls then maybe this is ok. However, for those of us with homes, our options are limited especially when considering a wired/wireless combination. I'm going to explore other options.

I did like the setup software for the router firewall, however.

Now that things are working well together, I'm glad, but the devices weren't cooperative at first. For the better part of a week, I was playing with the settings for my WAP, my router, and my wireless card. What I have found works is changing the default profile's SSID in the Linksys Wireless Connection Manager (I installed it in Windows XP because it seems to be handling connecting to multiple access points better than Windows XP) to "any." This will allow the card to connect to the closest access point.

Using encryption was a little troublesome, as well. The WAP allows you to enter a passphrase from which the WAP calculates the key. The Windows wireless connection manager only allows you to enter the key. This is not an easy task with a 128-bit key. The Linksys manager, however, does allow you to enter the passphrase and calculates the key for you. This was much easier, and I now have encrypted wireless communications.

One last thing to think about is the use of a 2.4GHz cordless phone. Our cordless phone will occaisionally use the same channel, which kills the connection between my laptop and my WAP. After forcing the phone to find another channel, my connection is restored.

It gets two stars because for the 5 minutes a day that it works, it works great. It's faster than the wired connection I used to work on and the ability to work in a different part of my house is invaluable to me. Which makes me so mad that it doesn't work reliably enough.

After reading some of the other reviews, I'm not the only one who has gone through this, so it's not just me. Good luck trying to find support on the web, especially at broadbandwhatever.com as those guys are no help. And although Linksys's tech support people are very nice, they take forever to get to the root of the problem and THEN THE PROBLEM COMES BACK! Plus you spend 2 hours on hold waiting for somebody to get on the phone.

My goodness, I'm returning this tomorrow and trying a different company.

Setting up the Access Point was not easy. (If you have Windows XP, it will be very, very easy. We didn't.) After a call to their tech line we were in business. I also had trouble installing one of the USB connectors to one of my Windows ME computers. After installing XP on that computer, it connected right away.

Connection is near always 100%, sometimes dipping into 97%. The router is in the middle of the house, and it reaches all computers in the basement and the second floor with perfect connection. Cable speeds are as fast as when the computer was hard wired to the modem.

I really do recommend this product to anyone setting up a home network. We're all sharing the internet, printers, and files on our new Linksys wireless network.

The test was conducted by sending 1024 bit packets at maximum data rate with the old fashion DOS program 'ping'. I set the ping address so that it would ping test data all the way through the wireless access point and on to the DSL router. This is to accurately see how fast data from a wired network (ie the router) can be transfered through the wired network port built-in to the access point, across the wireless access point and then to my USB wireless adapter on my laptop. The resulting victor was the Belkin which returned packets the solidly and fast at 11ms (0.011 seconds). The Linksys had a return rate around 11 to 13 with fluctuations up to 20 and 40ms.

This is not all that bad except for one major problem. Every 60 seconds the Linksys access point paused for around 3200ms (3.2seconds)! I don't know if a newer firware version would fix this or what in the world the access point is doing for 3 seconds out of every minute but it sure isn't transmitting my data.

If you would like to conduct your own data return test on your wireless network, I would suggest positioning your access point and wireless adapter as far apart as possible while still maintaining a link and then check the data rate by typing
'ping -t -l 1024 192.168.0.1' Please note that the IP address (191.168.0.1) should be replaced with your own IP address of your DSL or cable modem router and it should be typed in on your laptop or remote computer with the wireless adapter using a windows DOS 'Command Prompt'. Hope this helps.

-Jerome

Unfortunately, things went downhill from there. I started to have problems with my wireless network going down. The access point would appear to be up and running (I could connect to its internal webserver), but neither of my clients could connect. This was usually solved by restarting the access point, or the clients (or both). Doing this on a regular basis wasn't acceptable so I tried a firmware update (which, btw, was very easy to install). After the firmware update, the situation got worse. The wireless network was completely non-functional.

To solve the problem I started to dig in to the configuration of the access point. I had tweaked a couple of settings to make it more secure (btw, its default settings are very insecure), so I tried changing some of these options. After some trial and error I managed to get everything running again (by reenabling SSID broadcast, in case you were wondering). Since then the network has been rock solid.

In the end I am happy with the product. It is easy to setup and configure, and has been working fine since the initial headache.

No kidding... then the guy tried to make me feel bad that the hardware was failing... Linksys tech support is a bunch of morons... don't buy this product.

--Pat / zippy at cs.brandeis.edu

I am happy to say it is working quite well. I have it installed upstairs and receive full coverage through the whole ground floor with the signal only weakening in the kitchen. All the walls in my house are drywall, so I guess I can not comment on the brick and or plaster reviews elsewhere.

At minimal signal I still get excellent speed out on the back porch and even on the far side of the pool (90 feet), it is slower than inside the house, but much faster than any dial-up connection.

Most important upon installation is to write down your WEP Key if you enable WEP protection, which you should. Anyway, you need the key to set up your laptop correctly, ....

My only complaint has not to do with the WAP11 but rather the Linksys router it is connected to. No performance complaints, its just that it emits a high pitched sound that is just loud enough to hear and be kind of a bother. If you plan on using multiple PC's and on buying a Linksys router to go with the WAP11, then don't place the Linksys BESFR41 router in a room anyone is sleeping in or you will need to power down every night.

Solid product, and you gotta love the freedom.