Netgear WAG311 802.11A/B/G ( WAG311 )

Rating:
Summary: Connect-me wirelessly!
Review: I highly recommend using this product with a NetGear Access Point or NetGear firewall combo-device like the FWAG114. The only caveat is the signal was sometimes surprisingly low in a small area, but as it constantly polls different frequencies, it improves over time.

Rating:
Summary: Tri-Band PCI with external antenna connector
Review: It's difficult, if not impossible, these days to find a pci based wireless card that handles all three bandwidths a/b/g with adequate power and an external antenna connector so you can extend the range of your card significantly. The FCC has a mess of regulations regarding the 5 gig band and the addition of transmit and receive sensitivity, whether by adding your own external attenna or raw power output of the card, is strictly regulated. On the surface it might look like this card falls lock step to the FCC code as it comes with a netgear shield over it and a seemingly fixed wire that runs out to the end of a 2.5 inch fixed dipole.

But on closer inspection you only need to pop off the shield with some needlenose pliers (taking into account the voidance of the warranty of course) to discover the hidden mcx connector that you can detach the stock antenna and add your own mcx pigtail of your choice. There's even a nice little solder block to allow you to solder your own pigtail onto and opening for the connector on the card. The b/g radio can crank to 98mW and 11a up to 50mW of power. There are only a handful of PCI tri mode cards, and this is one of the only that have the power requirements and external antenna requirement I wanted without having to soder my own straight onto the pcb.

Rating:
Summary: Netgear Equals Superb Service
Review: This holiday season I was a good santa and purchased numerous wireless networking products for my various family members. Sure it was partially a selfish act as I wanted to be able to easily connect when I went to visit, but for the most part it was just an act of giving. I purchased mainly G products and they varied from routers to USB adapters to PC Card adapters. I did also purchase a couple of B products for those in the family that already had some wireless networking products (yes, I know they are backwards compatible but I didn't want to take any chances).

Only two members of the family had installation problems (considering my family is very non-technical I was quite impressed) and those two people both had yet to upgrade to Windows XP SP2. The rest of the family members were up and running within minutes.

As for the couple of family members that did have problems, well they called me first (of course) and I told them to just run back through the installation procedure again. This solved the problem for Uncle Dennis but Grandma Joyce still couldn't get it to work properly. I reluctantly told her to call Netgear's technical support (hey the reviews on Amazon haven't been too pretty for their tech support). I however was quite pleased when an hour later I got an email from Grandma Joyce thanking me for the great gift. I called her back and she told me that after fiddling with the settings with the Netgear people she was up and running within 30 minutes.

Overall, I consider this the ultimate test of product quality and support and I would give Netgear two thumbs up.

I hope this review was helpful to you in putting your mind at ease regarding ease of setup and trust of technical support if needed.