Wireless networking has become ubiquitous in our daily lives (though not nearly as ubiquitous as in Japan), and is gaining a very good foothold in terms of mobile Internet in cities, airports, hotels and others. Yet many older (and even some newer) laptops do not have built-in wireless Internet – or have older technologies, like 802.11b, and users may wish to upgrade it to something better: this is where Buffalo’s offerings come in.

Installing the card was a breeze – included drivers worked and just pointing Windows to the directory with drivers made the card work and automatically connect to my test network. I ran three tests, connecting to three different types of access points: a Linksys WRT54GS, a Buffalo AirStation G54 and an unknown D-Link access point whose signal seeped into my apartment from an unknown neighbour. Connections to all of the above were smooth and with no difficulties, be it to my WEP-enabled Linksys or to my open-access Buffalo access point. Range was quite good, as well: I was unable to get the card to lose signal by walking around the apartment and by going outside into hallways and such. The manufacturer claims up to 70% longer range; while I was unable to measure it to the meter, the range was certainly significantly better than the stock WiFi cards installed in both of my laptops.

Speeds were very respectable. While I wasn’t able to get anything near the theoretical 54Mbit/sec of 802.11g (which is the case for most devices, anyway), I was able to transfer a 258MB file in 104 seconds (1 minute, 44 seconds), compared to just over 13 minutes over a 802.11b connection. This equates to a transfer rate of approximately 2.48 MBytes/sec at 802.11g as opposed to approximately 350 KBytes/sec over 802.11b. When connecting to a Buffalo high power Turbo125 access point, I was not able to obtain a noticeable speed improvement; however, this may differ with test conditions.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with the Buffalo wireless card: while it’s still a bulkier solution than a built-in wireless card, if your laptop has no wireless (or has only 802.11b), this makes for an excellent addition to it. The performance, ease of setup and versatility (not to mention improved range) make this a worthwhile product for today’s road warrior.

Rating •••••88%•••••