I recently received a total wireless networking package from SMC featuring a router, PCI card, and PCMCIA card for a laptop. SMC is a company that’s been around for a long time, but some of you may not have heard of them. That’s OK though – networking companies rarely hold the same status among modders and overclockers as a video card manufacturer has. To skip the history, SMC has been doing their thing for over 30 years, and if you think about it that’s basically when networking started outside of universities and government. Let’s see if all that experience makes their wireless package as good as it sounds!
From the manufacturer: “The Barricade g 2.4GHz 54Mbps Wireless Cable/DSL Broadband router (SMC2804WBR) is the perfect networking solution for any home and business user that is looking for a simple, all-in-one network product. This platform independent multi-functional router combines a 4-port 10/100 Mbps dual-speed switch with Automatic MDI-MDIX feature, a high speed 54Mbps wireless access point, two detachable antennas, Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) firewall security, network management, and Virtual Private Network (VPN) passthrough support into one convenient device. The new Barricade g offers a high data rate that is up to 5 times faster than the widely used 802.11b wireless LAN and is backward compatible with existing 802.11b network devices.”
Wow, so many features in such a small package! After opening it up, the router is about the size of your average 8-port hub/switch. It does have some weight to it, so I’d imagine it’s packed full of hardware. My personal router/firewall is an old PC running on Linux, so to think that much of what it does can now be accomplished by a tiny product like this is pretty cool if you think about it. Included with the router is two antennas, an install CD, a setup guide, a power cord, and six feet of cat-5 ethernet cable. For so little hardware, they sure do use a lot of packaging!
Taking a closer look at the router it is very compact, and the included antennas are only about four inches long. On the back we see two antenna connector points, four ethernet ports, and a WAN port (where you would hook in your DSL or Cable modem).
Installation was a snap. Plug in the power cord, hook up your modem to the WAN port, and that’s about it! Config takes a bit more effort – but I’ll get to that a little later on in the review.
From the manufacturer: “The EZ Connect g 54Mbps Wireless PCI Card (SMC2802W) is another cutting edge introduction in 2.4GHz wireless communication for your desktop. Designed for both business and home users, this new adapter provides the speed, coverage, and security expected by today’s wireless users. Based on the IEEE 802.11g standard, the new EZ Connect g Wireless PCI Card is 5 times faster than the widely used 802.11b wireless networking devices and is 100% compatible with existing 802.11b wireless networks. The SMC2802W is extremely fast and can handle streaming video, multimedia and all other bandwidth-intensive applications. Wireless clients can now easily obtain instant, seamless high-speed network connection.”
Holding the package in my hand, this feels like a feather next to the router. Much smaller package and, after opening it up, much less contents. Besides the card itself there’s only a driver CD, an antenna, and a tiny instruction manual I didn’t even read (just pop the card in and install drivers). Looking closer at the card, it looks like they just glued the PCMCIA laptop card to some PCB to get it to interface with a desktop PC! Interesting way to bring down production costs.
Installation
Installation was pretty straightforward. All there is to do is put the card in an open PCI slot and screw in the antenna. After powering on the PC it detected an ‘Unknown Network Device’, but the driver install takes care of that. I downloaded the latest drivers off the SMC website, and I recommend anyone else do the same. Driver CD’s are often out of date by the time you get the product home. The total installation only took about fifteen minutes.
From the manufacturer: “The EZ Connect™ g 54Mbps Wireless Cardbus Adapter (SMC2835W) is another cutting edge introduction in 2.4GHz wireless communication for your laptop. Designed for both business and home users, this new adapter provides the speed, coverage, and security expected by today’s wireless users. Based on the IEEE 802.11g standard, the new EZ Connect g Wireless Cardbus Adapter is 5 times faster than the widely used 802.11b wireless networking devices and is 100% compatible with existing 802.11b wireless networks. The SMC2835W is extremely fast and can handle streaming video, multimedia and all other bandwidth-intensive applications. Wireless clients can now easily obtain instant, seamless high-speed network connection.”
Now this is the real reason wireless started taking hold – the laptop. After all, what good is a portable computer that needs to be plugged in to access the internet? All it is is more expensive and 30 pounds lighter than a desktop. Computers nowadays – especially in business – are pretty useless without a ‘net connection. Without email modern business wouldn’t be modern business. For home users it’s the same dilemma, how can you work peacefully on the porch or in bed when you have to plug into your home network?
The SMC box is pretty sparse – just the card itself, some drivers, and an install guide that I didn’t read (…put card in PCMCIA slot, do we really need to be told this?). Taking a closer look at the card you can see there’s two little LEDs, one that signifies a connection and another for link activity.
Installation
Installation went easily enough – just pop it in! After powering on the PC it detected an ‘Unknown Network Device’, but the driver install takes care of that. I downloaded the latest drivers off the SMC website, and I recommend anyone else do the same. Driver CD’s are often out of date by the time you get the product home. The total install time was about fifteen minutes. As you can see in the following pics the part of the card that protrudes from the side of the laptop has a pretty small profile. I found it didn’t get in the way at all.
To configure the router one must be hardwired to it, meaning you’ll need a regular ethernet NIC in one of your machines to set up the wireless. It kind of defeats the purpose if you ask me… Nonetheless, I inserted the ‘3-Step Install’ CD and went through the wizard. The three step config for the router was absolutely dead simple. It took literally 10 seconds to get the router set up and hooked to the net. DHCP worked flawlessly, and the machine that was hardwired was surfing around without a hitch.
There was a problem though. Now that I had finished the wizard, what next? How do I configure the firewall, or the wireless? As it would turn out, the reason I had no clue what to do was no fault of my own. There wasn’t an instruction manual included with my router! I managed to find a PDF of the manual on the SMC site, but it seems pretty clumsy to leave out the manual. Once I figured out how to get into the config area, you get two options. The ‘Setup Wizard’ is the same 3-Step process that the install CD takes you through, and the Advanced Options is where all the good stuff is! The first area of Advanced Options is the status screen.
The first thing I did was head straight to the wireless options! I set my ESSID, essentially a Network-ID, to FUNKY. Why? Because I’m like that. That’s why. For the wireless mode I chose ’11g only’ since all my hardware is wireless-G spec. It has options for backwards compatibility to wireless-B spec, but I had no reason to use that option. I of course turned ‘g NITRO’ on, it’s supposed to increase range and speed in G only networks!
By default wireless is enabled, as well it should be, but there is no security applied to the connection. I didn’t even want to start testing until I had a secure line. I live in San Francisco and there’s a cafe full of laptop-toting yuppies across the street – I don’t need them wandering into my network! After doing a little reading, I chose to use WEP only encryption, but you can choose from WEP, WPA, mixed, or 802.1x authentication (mainly for companies with wireless servers from what I read). With 128bit static security you need a 26-digit alphanumeric hex-key on each machine that connects to the router. Imagine how much fun it is to make sure you get that key exactly right every time (something like ‘2BA289AFC987ED8F90AB012DA5’)! SMC has a great feature in that you can enter a passphrase from which the 26-digit key is generated. With other SMC products the passphrase will generate the same key, thus removing the need to painstakingly enter some crazy 26-digit key all over the place!
There are some other cool features as well, my favorite being DDNS (which I already use on my Linux box, it’s VERY convenient for remote admin). With dynamic DNS your IP changes every time to disconnect and reconnect to the internet, and if constantly connected it will STILL change every couple days. This makes it pretty impossible to host any type of server. With DDNS you can map a domain to your IP that updates the DNS settings every time your IP changes. In other words, no matter what your IP, you can always be connected to at ‘whatever.something.net’! There is a fee after the 30-day trail, but if you plan on hosting anything it may be worth it. Also, there is virtual server and NAT features. This is needed so that when people connect to your external IP from the internet (your modem) the router will map them to an internal machine that is hosting a server.
Most other features like the firewall are pretty self-explanitory. The only other thing I want to call attention to is the firmware upgrade. This is nice as you can update the router software when SMC comes up with new stuff – in fact the ‘g NITRO’ update needs to be installed with this feature. Just as drivers can make video cards perform better, there may be new wireless optimizations that may one day improve wireless networks like the ‘g NITRO’ update did.
To test the network speed I created a directory with 100MB of small files and a single, 100MB file on a machine that was hardwired to the router. The reason for the two variants is that I’ve noticed a single, large file can sometimes transfer faster than many small files because the network has to constantly make calls for new files rather than just mobbing data over the pipe. The following pic is a floorplan of my apartment, although not quite to scale. The router is the red dot, the blue dot is the desktop machine, and the green dots are the places where I tested the laptop speed. To test, I timed the transfer speed of the 100MB files.
The desktop, as you can see, had to contend with three full walls worth of resistance. Because of this it averaged a Tx rate of 24Mbps. The actual transfers took about 85 seconds, which would put the actual throughput at about 10Mbps. The connection was very stable and the transfer speeds were consistent over six tests. I tested the transfers against interference such as microwaves, cordless phones, etc… and they had no measurable effect.
The laptop tests varied widely. The test from the farthest point in the apartment took over fifteen minutes to transfer the 100MB file at an average Tx Rate of 1Mbps. Given the time and filesize, the actual throughput was 932Kbps. The test near the desktop yielded identical results of about 10Mbps actual throughput. Right next to the router I achieved the full 54Mbps that wireless-G spec promises, and through one wall to the living room the throughput varied from 24Mbps to 48Mbps.
Testing Internet Connection Reliability
With the exception of the far corner of the apartment, the internet connection was consistent and achieved full speed (1.5Mbps) anywhere in the apartment. The connection never dropped out and I was able to wander around with the laptop all I wanted. The far corner of the apartment did experience performance degradation and an occasional drop out, but if you were only surfing the web it wouldn’t be that bad. It was still faster than dial up! I used the router for several days during testing, and the wireless connectivity worked all the time, every time. In other words, once you get it set up you can basically forget about it!
If you are looking for a great wireless routing solution for your home or office, SMC does the job quite well. The router is easy to set up and there are tons of features. The NICs set up quickly and don’t require any knowledge of networking to get connected. The routing features take literally seconds to set up, they start working immediately, and there’s plenty of speed and range for internet routing purposes. The downside is for true networking purposes such as filesharing or fileserving, the speed just doesn’t compare to a hardwired 100Mbps fast ethernet network. Response time can be slower, transfer speeds can vary, and reliability isn’t always 100%.
To sum it up, this is a great package for wireless internet routing and light networking, but if your needs require some heavy-hitting network throughput then wireless isn’t for you. If you want printserving, fileserving, big filesharing, super-security, or anything like that – go wired. Despite its lack of power in true networking, I doubt that’s what most people use wireless for anyway. Because of that, I give it an 8.5/10.
Pros
- No wires!
- Easy setup for both router and clients
- Great for internet routing
- Fully featured router
Cons
- Not the best for heavy networking
- Pricey – $200-$250 for the set