So since tiger direct was having a sale on the DWL-900AP, and it seemed to do what i wanted it to do, $65 each including shipping, and a friend and I bought 3 of them between us. One is for a coffee shop in town, and one each.
Anyhow, so here it goes.
Things I like:
- Nice small form factor
- Cheap
- ap, bridge, point to point, point to multipoint and ap client modes.
- Did i mention cheap?
Things I don't like:
- Requires windows to configure, but then again, everything but cisco seems to (and airports require a Mac officialy).
- Seems to have poor receive sensitivity, with a signal to noise ratio of 50 and my laptop right next to the AP, both set to Auto for the rate... I was getting a 2Mb connection.
- Crappy. By crappy i mean this. 10 signal to noise ratio, still at 2Mb connection, and it was dropping between 46% and 16% of the packets. Setting the rate on my laptop to 1Mb reduced packet loss down to between 0% and 20% packet loss at that position.
- RP-SMA connection for the antenna. This isn't hugely their fault, just that everything else seems to use RP-TNC (like the WAP-11 and the Aironet 4800 Bridge that I have).
My friend was unable to connect to the network using his TiBook, he can see the network but it refuses to connect. He can connect fine to a Wap11 v2.2 and to an Airport (obviously).
Conclusion: It's basicaly alright because they're so cheap. In most of these locations speed is not a huge issue for us, and I'm going to lock the rate on the AP's at 1Mb to reduce packet loss problems. I'm hoping that a firmware update will fix some of these issues. I would definitly recommend a WAP-11 over these, even though there are some neat features... which wouldn't be that useful, because the performance is pretty poor. Also the v2.2 Wap11 has all these features. I've got my own complaints with the Wap11 however. oh well. --ForrestEnglish
I have one of these and have had no problems with it whatsoever. It connected at full speed, though if sitting right next to it there was some strange issues like Forrest has mentioned above. --CrazyOzie