OUTDOOR ACCESS POINT: D-Link Outdoor Access Point (DWL-1700AP)

This is an outdoor wireless access point from D-Link, based on the 802.11b WiFi standard. Being an outdoor model, it has a hard metal body to protect it from harsh outdoor weather. It can, therefore, be used to provide connectivity in large campus area networks. It supports power over Ethernet, which means you don't need a separate power adapter for it. The access point can be configured to work in four other modes besides a standard access point, which include bridge, static-based router, PPPoE-based router and Dynamic-based router.

On the security front, it supports MAC address-based filtering, 802.1x-based security that requires Radius-based authentication and, of course, the standard 128-bit WEP encryption. The access point also has a built-in firewall. It can work as an inbound virtual server and provide IP-based access control to wireless users. For example, if you want to provide access to the wireless users in your office Web or FTP servers, then you can define a virtual server on your access point, which is pointing to your office Web/FTP server. The firewall offers protection against denial of service attacks. To test the access point, we installed it on our office rooftop and used a standard Prism chipset-based WiFi card on a notebook. We configured it in static-based router mode. It gave us a maximum throughput of 5 Mbps with excellent signal strength. It supports dynamic rate shifting, due to which the throughput automatically drops with the distance. The maximum distance we could take our wireless client and still remain connected to the access point was 600
mtrs. 

Overall, a good buy for campus connectivity. 

Sanjay Majumder