Linksys Wireless-G Access Point WAP54G > Reviews > The WAP is dead, long live the WAP

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Very fast
Ease of Installation	Good - quick to install
Ease of use	Very easy
Reliability	Excellent
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Fast, easy to configure, reasonable price for a Wireless Access Point
Disadvantages:	slight snag in set up .  Easily resolved

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

My dearly beloved Linksys WAP11b passed on this week. At the request of the family there were no flowers but a small celebration was held to remember a long and hard working life and the opportunity to get a new one.

Including VAT and delivery, for £48.15 , Novatech.co.uk sent me one of these little charmers.

Let me explain my home setup:
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The ADSL line starts at my phone line and passes through a Linksys ADSL ethernet modem. This is connected to a seperate router which has four ports in it.

Two of those ports are used by the CAT5 structured cable network, connecting the two desktop computers to each other and the internet. one of the ports is spare and the other hosts the Wireless Access Point, or WAP. Doing this separately was deliberate, the failure of a single component will not prevent all usage.

Setting it up.
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It is the same size, colour and shape as the unit it is replacing. the appearance is, to my mind, unimportant as it lives in a corner behind a sofa, along with all the other networking hardware. Setting it up was fairly straightforward, with one easily resolved glitch.

I wanted it to be set up in the same way as my old unit so that there was no need to re-configure all the clients, which include five laptops and a smartphone.
You plug a network patch leadinto the WAP, the other end of that cable goes into the port on the router. A cable is included in the box but I use a cable that I made, it is less than 1 metre long so does not dangle all over the place. Next you take the mains power adapter out of the box and plug it into the WAP, then into the mains.
All the pretty lights on the front of the box will come on.
That's it!

Configuring the WAP
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This wasn't too hard once I got round the small problem I had with locating the box on my network.
With my laptop connected to the router using the spare port (remember that one?) I ran the setup CD. it allowed me to access the configuration and enter my details. As my router is set to assign IP addresses automatically (using the DHCP protocol) I set the WAP to DHCP rather than fixed IP.

I noted that it was set to use channel 11 (you have a choice of 1-11) and entered my SSID, or access point 'nickname' I set the security to WEP (Wireless Equivalence Protocol) and entered my previously used WEP key. I won't mention the SSID or WEP key here as, if I did , the lane outside my house would be packed with paedophiles using my bandwidth to download their nasty wares.

Rebooted the lot and it worked, for about 25 seconds. BUGGER!

A quick visit to the FAQ section of the Linksys website (Now you see why I like to have all the units separate) and I found the cause.

They mention that some cordless phones use the same 2.4 Ghz radio frequency as the WAP and to try changing the channel. They also mentioned that the default was 6, so back into the setup utility and change it from 11 to 6, where it should have been in the first place. as soon as I did this and closed the setup program, my wireless connection was working, so 10 out of 10 for the Linksys website and a big BOO! to the quick setup guide in the box.

Summary
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Five reboots later and all is still well. The new box connects in a fraction of the time of the old one, and page load a great deal faster. This very review comes to you via the new WAP, as proof of its efficacy

If it performs as well as its predecessor I will be very pleased, this one was half the price of the old one