LevelOne Wireless LAN WAP-0006

The WAP-0006 wireless access point acts as your bridge for your Ethernet and

IEEE 802.11g/b 2.4 GHz wireless networks.It comes with a 10/100 Ethernet port,

dipole antenna port and a power-adapter port. You also have an option to upgrade

the antenna to a high gain antenna. On security front, it supports WEP, WPA, MAC

access filtering and ESSID broadcast disable function.

Its easy interface allows configuration from a Web browser. Also it

integrates DHCP server to provide multiple wireless users to get their IP

addresses automatically.

For our tests, we used a Thinkpad R52 which was a Centrino notebook and

supporting both 802.11 b and g. For a point-to-point data transfer of 50 MB

(Burst Copy), the throughput was 6 Mbps. The UDP throughput for 100 Kb data was

26 Mbps. Streaming of the same data at a rate of 50 Kbps for 10 sec gave a

throughput of 49.85 Kbps, and there was no data loss during streaming. For the

response time for TCP and UDP, it give 1 ms, which is good. Even with such

results, it could not outperform the LevelOne Access Point (WAP-0010), which

gave a throughput of 19-20 Mbps when we reviewed it in September last year. It

was a difference of 6 Mbps than the 0006. The WAP 0010 from LevelOne came with a

PC network adapter, which boosts the performance. Without this network adapter,

the WAP 0006 gives an average performance.

Bottom Line: Looking at the performance it delivers, it's a fair deal

for small wireless networks at this price.