We got a good connection all the way to the hallway in the far left but once we turned the corner the signal dropped off rapidly because of the metal doors/brick walls. From what I remember the data rate was good too but since we only had a day with the device we didn't note specfic numbers at various locations.
It's actually quite big compared to a normal AP but looks like nothing more than an oversized smoke detector when setup.
The term wireless switch may be misleading, more than one laptop can connect to each IAP and the wireless link is still a shared medium.
Where this product differs is it's ability to use all of the unlicensed spectrum within a given area. This translates into 3 channels on 802.11b/g and 12 channels on 802.11a.
The range for 802.11b/g was about average but for 802.11a it was great. This is because each IAP has it's own antenna pointing in a specific direction (70 degrees wide) which allows the signal to be amplified by 7dbi rather than the normal 2.2dbi for an omnidirectional. This translates in the transmitted power being roughly doubled.
Some people say they could "emulate" the devices result using a bunch of WRT54Gs but since those operate in 2.4GHz they would all overlap and cause massive interference problems. The only effective way to get massive amounts of wireless bandwidth within a given area is using 5GHz because there are more non-overlapping channels (12 vs 3).
Another cool feature with the product is the lights on the front of the array. There is one for each IAP and they light up when someone associates to that IAP.
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We got a good connection all the way to the hallway in the far left but once we turned the corner the signal dropped off rapidly because of the metal doors/brick walls. From what I remember the data rate was good too but since we only had a day with the device we didn't note specfic numbers at various locations.
It's actually quite big compared to a normal AP but looks like nothing more than an oversized smoke detector when setup.
The term wireless switch may be misleading, more than one laptop can connect to each IAP and the wireless link is still a shared medium.
Where this product differs is it's ability to use all of the unlicensed spectrum within a given area. This translates into 3 channels on 802.11b/g and 12 channels on 802.11a. The range for 802.11b/g was about average but for 802.11a it was great. This is because each IAP has it's own antenna pointing in a specific direction (70 degrees wide) which allows the signal to be amplified by 7dbi rather than the normal 2.2dbi for an omnidirectional. This translates in the transmitted power being roughly doubled.
Some people say they could "emulate" the devices result using a bunch of WRT54Gs but since those operate in 2.4GHz they would all overlap and cause massive interference problems. The only effective way to get massive amounts of wireless bandwidth within a given area is using 5GHz because there are more non-overlapping channels (12 vs 3).
Another cool feature with the product is the lights on the front of the array. There is one for each IAP and they light up when someone associates to that IAP.