TRENDnet: Low-cost but solid designs?
For the last 5 years, I've stuck with a few, stock PRISM-II 802.11b WLAN CardBus and PCI cards for network access on the road. They've served me well, with fairly good reception and other quality. Unfortunately, the cards have been starting to age and reception quality has been going down. Furthermore, I've largely avoided turning on Wireless at home (only using it on the road) because of the holes in WEP -- even if/when I use A) a separate LAN segment (from wired) in IPCop, B) MAC filtering both in the AP and IPCop, C) 128-bit WEP keys as well as D) turn off ESSID broadcast. All-in-all, I was really looking to update to WPA before bringing back up my AP at home with new WPA-capable cards.
Access Point
It all started when I stupidly tried to flash a 3 year-old Linksys 54g unit. A new firmware did WPA. Needless to say, and I know my way around embedded systems, the web-based firmware upload didn't work. And Linksys didn't offer a TFTP boot option for firmware upload on this unit. So I decided to buy a new AP unit -- NOTE: a true, AP/bridging-only unit, not a 'Ritter.
After looking at various reviews, I settled on the TRENDnet TEW-610APB. It has the newer MIMO marketing hype flying around, but most people liked the feature set and use. Other than the default password being the same as the username (and not just password), the setup was uneventful. I was able to setup all the options I wanted, authentication/key options, etc... I also was able to put the AP in invisible mode (no ESSID broadcast) and it worked fine with my existing 802.11b PRISM-II cards doing 128-bit WEP.
So then I was off to buy some new station cards capable of WPA and 802.11g.
Station Cards
A few years ago I bought a DLink Atheros AR521x-based 802.11a/b/g PCI card for my desktop with a large, external -8dbi antennae. This was because wireless was poor in the apartment I had temporarly setup residence in (for my job 1,000 miles from home) and it worked fine until I broke off the soldier points (re-soldier never worked nearly as well). The Atheros AR521x is an excellent MAC and good support in Linux (madwifi), with the exception of the HAL -- which has more to do with the FCC than Atheros' wish to keep the drivers closed source (they are quite open -- except for the HAL).
I started to look through several Atheros AR521x-based options, and they were virtually all $60+ -- even for those that were only 802.11b/g with no 802.11a support. So I decided to check out other options before I dropped $60-90. Intel's PRO/Wireless cards are virtually non-existent in CardBus or PCI forms. Looking around you can only find them in Mini-PCI or newer Express/Card options, and even then they are hard to find and still cost a pretty penny. I really wanted to avoid a cheap design, because I figured it would cost me more in my time and money. I wanted to find one with native Linux support (avoid NDIS wrapper) and a solid MAC+radio design -- two things that would be unlikely with a cheap card.
In some stupid, random decision when I went to buy a UPS from CompUSA, I decided to try out a sub-$15 CompUSA 54g cards on clearance. My first thought was I if it didn't work under Linux, I could always give it to my wife for use under Windows XP-only. When I first discovered they were based on the Software MAC RealTek RTL8185, and then both the RealTek r818x and GPL r8180 drivers loaded under Linux, I thought I had hit the cheapskate jackpot! But over the next 4 hours, I could never get the radio to do anything under Linux, and I quickly gave up. Over the next 4 hours, I found not even Windows XP was better. The radio quality wasn't even half as good as my aging PRISM-II 802.11b cards. Although WPA worked, if I lost connection or remove the card, I had to reboot to re-connect -- definitely not acceptable! Even when I used the system tray's "safely remove" hardware option in Windows XP, the sucker would not come back up if I re-inserted. I also got weird operation with a VPN running atop -- whereas the existing PRISM-II had no issues. Lastly, WPA refused to work when the AP was in invisible (no ESSID broadcast) and that was also not acceptable!
After that frustration, I was ready to spend $60+ on an Atheros AR521x solution just to save myself time.
The local Circuit City here in New England had the DLink RangeBooster G WNA2330 on-sale for $50, instead of $60. It had fair reviews so I went for it -- I mean, with the Atheros AR521x inside and supposed "better range/reception", I couldn't lose, right? Yes, it came right up with the madwifi drivers from the ATrpms repository under Linux, but the frustration quickly returned after that. This "Rangebooster" had even worse signal quality than the CompUSA 54g cards -- literally half as good, and intolerable compared to the old PRISM-II. At 10 feet from the AP here at my hotel, the PRISM-II is 100%, the CompUSA 54g was 75% and the "RangeBooster" was sub-30%!!! WTF? I returned that sucker just today, it was a total bomb, but at least Circuit City didn't charge me a restocking fee (unlike BestBuy would fight me on)! I bought a $60 card and I got worse results under even Windows XP!
Now I was questioning if the Atheros AR521x wasn't such a good option -- at least in the non-tri-mode, b/g-only flavors. At this point, I was even considering just dropping $1,000 for a new Intel Core Duo notebook with the IPW3945 on-board and be done with it. But no, I wanted to hold off on a new notebook and I figured I'd give the Atheros AR521x series one more try. After all -- the Atheros/madwifi solution worked for me in the past. I almost tried a Belkin's CardBus and PCI Atheros options, but just like Linksys, I you cannot trust their model numbers -- they change solutions mid-model and don't always list the "version" on the box. But I really didn't want to drop more than $50 on another Atheros solution. Yeah, TRENDnet had sub-$30 options, but that's just too good to be true. I mean, I'm the first person to say brand name means squat today -- and I wasn't about to be a fool by assuming TRENDnet's station cards might be a great buy, right?
Okay, I was a fool. I went ahead and ordered the sub-$30 (each) TRENDnet TEW-441PC (CardBus) and TRENDnet TEW-443PI (PCI) -- the cheapest Atheros solutions you can basically find. Now I didn't go with the similarly costing, TEW-501/503 MIMO products yet because support was varied in the Madwifi support comments. I figured the 441/443 were the best options, given the feedback, although I wasn't expecting much in radio or other support. Getting anything more and I would be a plesantly surprised.
Well, damn if I wasn't shocked! The suckers worked solid -- and I mean solid! Signal quality is unbelievable -- better than my PRISM-II cards. I'm getting 36-54Mbps with the same signal quality as the PRISM-IIs are at 11Mbps. And that's was to the Linksys AP in my hotel -- not my TRENDnet at home! The Windows XP utility for "site survey" identifies all the APs in an ESSID and lets me choose the one I want (there are 3 in my hotel) -- far better than the other Windows utilities included with the other cards! Now back at home, I don't need to use the ESSID broadcast and the Madwifi driver even lets me use WPA under Linux!
WTF? I didn't even pay $30 for either of these cards? The -2dbi antennae works just fine -- both the CardBus card and the PCI card. There must be something wrong -- the cheap solution works damn well. I couldn't have just "gotten lucky" because both of them worked -- not just one card, but both! My notebook and portable desktop cube are very, very happy now! I'm sure TRENDnet sells some solutions that are not so good and I'm sure some of their newer products are not Linux compatible, but the 441/443 isn't very old either. I still don't go on brandname, but for these 3 TRENDnet products -- I'm definitely a closet TRENDnet fan for now, and will look for their name in any review of new products and their Linux compatibility as a "good first chance."
Access Point
It all started when I stupidly tried to flash a 3 year-old Linksys 54g unit. A new firmware did WPA. Needless to say, and I know my way around embedded systems, the web-based firmware upload didn't work. And Linksys didn't offer a TFTP boot option for firmware upload on this unit. So I decided to buy a new AP unit -- NOTE: a true, AP/bridging-only unit, not a 'Ritter.
After looking at various reviews, I settled on the TRENDnet TEW-610APB. It has the newer MIMO marketing hype flying around, but most people liked the feature set and use. Other than the default password being the same as the username (and not just password), the setup was uneventful. I was able to setup all the options I wanted, authentication/key options, etc... I also was able to put the AP in invisible mode (no ESSID broadcast) and it worked fine with my existing 802.11b PRISM-II cards doing 128-bit WEP.
So then I was off to buy some new station cards capable of WPA and 802.11g.
Station Cards
A few years ago I bought a DLink Atheros AR521x-based 802.11a/b/g PCI card for my desktop with a large, external -8dbi antennae. This was because wireless was poor in the apartment I had temporarly setup residence in (for my job 1,000 miles from home) and it worked fine until I broke off the soldier points (re-soldier never worked nearly as well). The Atheros AR521x is an excellent MAC and good support in Linux (madwifi), with the exception of the HAL -- which has more to do with the FCC than Atheros' wish to keep the drivers closed source (they are quite open -- except for the HAL).
I started to look through several Atheros AR521x-based options, and they were virtually all $60+ -- even for those that were only 802.11b/g with no 802.11a support. So I decided to check out other options before I dropped $60-90. Intel's PRO/Wireless cards are virtually non-existent in CardBus or PCI forms. Looking around you can only find them in Mini-PCI or newer Express/Card options, and even then they are hard to find and still cost a pretty penny. I really wanted to avoid a cheap design, because I figured it would cost me more in my time and money. I wanted to find one with native Linux support (avoid NDIS wrapper) and a solid MAC+radio design -- two things that would be unlikely with a cheap card.
In some stupid, random decision when I went to buy a UPS from CompUSA, I decided to try out a sub-$15 CompUSA 54g cards on clearance. My first thought was I if it didn't work under Linux, I could always give it to my wife for use under Windows XP-only. When I first discovered they were based on the Software MAC RealTek RTL8185, and then both the RealTek r818x and GPL r8180 drivers loaded under Linux, I thought I had hit the cheapskate jackpot! But over the next 4 hours, I could never get the radio to do anything under Linux, and I quickly gave up. Over the next 4 hours, I found not even Windows XP was better. The radio quality wasn't even half as good as my aging PRISM-II 802.11b cards. Although WPA worked, if I lost connection or remove the card, I had to reboot to re-connect -- definitely not acceptable! Even when I used the system tray's "safely remove" hardware option in Windows XP, the sucker would not come back up if I re-inserted. I also got weird operation with a VPN running atop -- whereas the existing PRISM-II had no issues. Lastly, WPA refused to work when the AP was in invisible (no ESSID broadcast) and that was also not acceptable!
After that frustration, I was ready to spend $60+ on an Atheros AR521x solution just to save myself time.
The local Circuit City here in New England had the DLink RangeBooster G WNA2330 on-sale for $50, instead of $60. It had fair reviews so I went for it -- I mean, with the Atheros AR521x inside and supposed "better range/reception", I couldn't lose, right? Yes, it came right up with the madwifi drivers from the ATrpms repository under Linux, but the frustration quickly returned after that. This "Rangebooster" had even worse signal quality than the CompUSA 54g cards -- literally half as good, and intolerable compared to the old PRISM-II. At 10 feet from the AP here at my hotel, the PRISM-II is 100%, the CompUSA 54g was 75% and the "RangeBooster" was sub-30%!!! WTF? I returned that sucker just today, it was a total bomb, but at least Circuit City didn't charge me a restocking fee (unlike BestBuy would fight me on)! I bought a $60 card and I got worse results under even Windows XP!
Now I was questioning if the Atheros AR521x wasn't such a good option -- at least in the non-tri-mode, b/g-only flavors. At this point, I was even considering just dropping $1,000 for a new Intel Core Duo notebook with the IPW3945 on-board and be done with it. But no, I wanted to hold off on a new notebook and I figured I'd give the Atheros AR521x series one more try. After all -- the Atheros/madwifi solution worked for me in the past. I almost tried a Belkin's CardBus and PCI Atheros options, but just like Linksys, I you cannot trust their model numbers -- they change solutions mid-model and don't always list the "version" on the box. But I really didn't want to drop more than $50 on another Atheros solution. Yeah, TRENDnet had sub-$30 options, but that's just too good to be true. I mean, I'm the first person to say brand name means squat today -- and I wasn't about to be a fool by assuming TRENDnet's station cards might be a great buy, right?
Okay, I was a fool. I went ahead and ordered the sub-$30 (each) TRENDnet TEW-441PC (CardBus) and TRENDnet TEW-443PI (PCI) -- the cheapest Atheros solutions you can basically find. Now I didn't go with the similarly costing, TEW-501/503 MIMO products yet because support was varied in the Madwifi support comments. I figured the 441/443 were the best options, given the feedback, although I wasn't expecting much in radio or other support. Getting anything more and I would be a plesantly surprised.
Well, damn if I wasn't shocked! The suckers worked solid -- and I mean solid! Signal quality is unbelievable -- better than my PRISM-II cards. I'm getting 36-54Mbps with the same signal quality as the PRISM-IIs are at 11Mbps. And that's was to the Linksys AP in my hotel -- not my TRENDnet at home! The Windows XP utility for "site survey" identifies all the APs in an ESSID and lets me choose the one I want (there are 3 in my hotel) -- far better than the other Windows utilities included with the other cards! Now back at home, I don't need to use the ESSID broadcast and the Madwifi driver even lets me use WPA under Linux!
WTF? I didn't even pay $30 for either of these cards? The -2dbi antennae works just fine -- both the CardBus card and the PCI card. There must be something wrong -- the cheap solution works damn well. I couldn't have just "gotten lucky" because both of them worked -- not just one card, but both! My notebook and portable desktop cube are very, very happy now! I'm sure TRENDnet sells some solutions that are not so good and I'm sure some of their newer products are not Linux compatible, but the 441/443 isn't very old either. I still don't go on brandname, but for these 3 TRENDnet products -- I'm definitely a closet TRENDnet fan for now, and will look for their name in any review of new products and their Linux compatibility as a "good first chance."
2 comments:
Cheers for the information,
took a look at their site, they seem to have a fair bit of nice things (extensive range too).
Shame their Irish prices differ so much from US ones, but nearly used to that by now.
Hopefully some of their other equipment is as good as what you found.
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