Product Reviews

The great thing about Apple's Airport products is that they're so easy to use, and allow even novice home users to set up a wireless network quickly and easily.

But, like all wireless networking devices that are based on the 802.11b or 802.11g technologies, they can experience reception problems in areas where there are objects such as partition walls, microwave ovens or cordless phones.

For this review, we attempted to set up an Airport network where all these three elements were crammed close together. This resulted in the signal from our Airport Extreme base station being weak, and one of the machines on our network couldn't pick up the signal at all.

Fortunately, there's a new generation of wireless networking products designed to tackle these issues. They're sometimes known as 'Pre-N' devices, as they incorporate elements of the forthcoming 802.11n wireless technology.

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The most important feature included in these new wireless devices is called MIMO (multiple input/multiple output) and refers to the fact that they contain multiple internal antennae. These antennae can automatically configure themselves to try and send their signal around obstacles such as your microwave oven wherever possible.

We imagine that Apple will include MIMO in the next generation of Airport products, but Netgear has done it first with its new WPN824 wireless base station. Like Airport, it doesn't include a built-in router, so you'll need to connect it to an existing router or modem first of all (just remember that the modem or router will need an Ethernet port to connect to the WPN824).

Setting up the unit is fairly straightforward. There's no equivalent of Airport's Setup Assistant, but the base station has its own HTML home page built in, so you simply use your web browser to open the home page and then enter settings such as your network password straight into the home page.

Ideally, you would have a matching MIMO wireless card in all networked computers, but the WPN824 can still give improved coverage to a standard 802.11b/g Airport card. In our test we found that the signal strength on our network improved enough to provide a stable signal. This alone makes it worth the money. The WPN824 is also cheaper than an Airport base station, so it's well worth looking at if you've had trouble setting up a wireless network at home or in the office.