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).
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.