Linksys Wireless Experiences

I have recently setup a wireless environment in order to evaluate and understand the wireless networking products. I have chosen to initially stay with a single vendor, this being Linksys for the time being. I have purchases a Linksys BEFW11S4 version 2 wireless router, and am actually using it behind a 2wire, in order to not disturb my home networking environment. See this page for the advantages of running the wireless router behind your existing wired router! In addition to the BEFW11S4, I have purchased a Linksys WMP11 PCI wireless card, and a Linksys WPC11 PC Card. I have also installed WMP11 PCI cards in one of my customer's setups. In all, I have installed the Linksys wireless products in the following environments:

1) Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless router - version 2

2) WMP11 in a clone PC running WinXP Home

3) WMP11 in a Dell 2350 running XP Home

4) WPC11 PC Card in an IBM Thinkpad 600E running Win98SE/Linux RedHat [dual boot]

5) WPC11 PC Card in IBM Thinkpad 600E running WinXP Pro

6) Netgear MR814 wireless router

7) SMC 2635W PC Card in an IBM Thinkpad 600E

In addition, I have recently acquired 802.11g products. See this page for a discussion of this:

8) Linksys WRT54G wireless router

9) Linksys WPC54G PC Card in IBM Thinkpad 600E running WinXP Pro.

Previous users of Linksys routers will feel right at home with this Linksys wireless router. There are just some additional tabs with the wireless configuration options, after the initial "enable" stuff on the main setup tab. Like most all of these wireless products, they come in a default mode (OOB) which is completely open, i.e. SSID being default "Linksys," and being broadcast, no MAC filtering, and WEP encryption disabled. You can take your wireless laptop and walk into somebody's house or next to his house, and jump right on his network in this manner. I have done it.

I am running version 1.44.2 in the BEFW11S4, which seems to be pretty stable. I have seen problems reported on 1.45, so am waiting for some additional experience on this one.

Installing the WMP11 in an XP environment is pretty straight forward. You can install the card before you install the software (the opposite is true for Win9X/ME). XP detects the card and you install the CDROM. XP uses its own wireless management utilities, called the "Wireless Zero Configuration capability."

Installing the WPC11 PC Card in a Win98SE was an adventure. You first must install the software, then reboot the computer, or plug the PC Card in, I can't tell which one. The install wizard then installs a card management utility. Somewhere, somehow this install is completely messed up on my Win98SE. This is after countless proper uninstalls, registry cleans, etc. The install wizard just doesn't "fail safe," as obviously I messed up a step somewhere along the line. The wireless management utility will no longer function.

But all has worked out well, because you don't need the wireless management facility provided by Linksys. You can go to Network neighborhood properties, and to the wireless card properties, and set the important parameters yourself, such as SSID, WEP or not, channel, etc. That is all that you need to do. And that is the way that I am functioning now.

Later, I went ahead and made the upgrade to XP, blowing away the Win98SE, and the Linux Redhat, as luck would have it - didn't have enough room because of XP's size. XP has a much more complete set of wireless capabilities, and you will not need to use the vendors utility, unless you choose to. So the list expands to include:

Go here and make sure your enable the security precautions available with standard (non WPA) Wifi installs - they are not bullet proof, but they keep the casual observer out of your network.

Update: As of fall 2003, Linksys is making the WPA upgrades available for the wireless 802.11G products. I am not sure when the WPA upgrades for the 802.11b products will be released, if ever. It would be a terrible oversight if the vendors do not come back and provide WPA upgrades for the 802.11b products! Stay tuned.

Update February 2006: WPA2 upgrades for WinXP are now available, and many products are available for it. Go to my WPA page and read all about it.

Here is a discussion of the Linksys wireless 802.1g and WPA products.

TCP/IP STUFF

WIRELESS STUFF

PC STUFF

ADSL/CABLE MODEM STUFF