Mobile Technology

There is no denying it. The WLAN market is sizzling hot right now, and almost every business, regardless of its size or structure, requires the convenience of working wirelessly. However, the drawback to most wireless network environments is that the 802.11 a/b/g standards are limited in range, number of connected simultaneous users and allotted bandwidth--meaning the endless quest for increased capacity and improved quality of service carries on.

Solution providers servicing the SMB space may want to take a look at a new wireless standard, referred to as MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) technology. It is designed to increase both wireless bandwidth and range by taking advantage of multiplexing usage algorithms to transmit and receive over multiple antennas. And two companies delving into the MIMO market are Asus and Airgo.

Airgo is a pioneer in enhancing wireless technology and recently partnered with Asus to bring a true MIMO solution to the SMB space. Asus manufactures a wireless router and a PC card NIC that leverages the technology developed by Airgo.

The Asus router, Model WL566gM, will run integrators $129 and the PCMCIA notebook card, Model WL106gM, will cost $95. The two new Asus products are powered by Airgo's True MIMO Gen 3 wireless chipset. Airgo's new chipset now provides faster connection speeds than 10/100 Ethernet while remaining 100 percent compatible with 802.11b, 11g and 11a Wi-Fi.

The company claims that MIMO technology offers data rates up to 24 0Mbps, which is kind of a stretch. However, in the CRN Lab environment; the MIMO solution surpassed the performance of wired 100BaseT Ethernet. CRN engineers were able to maintain a wireless connection throughout every floor of a four-story dwelling. Obviously, the signal strength was weaker than it was when on the same floor as the router, but the difference was negligible.

It is important to note that the enormous performance gains were only accomplished with the Asus/Airgo proprietary hardware-software bundle and were not seen mixing and matching 802.11x standards with MIMO technology.

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Installation consisted of connecting the router to the modem and running the setup wizard. Once the notebook client established a connection to the router using the 802.11g standard, the wireless connection on the client was disabled and a new connection was created using the Asus notebook card.

Once the software was installed, the client required a reboot. Upon startup, the Asus wireless router and card synced without any problems. The signal strength and the bandwidth utilization the client was receiving through the MIMO client-router connection