Actiontec Wireless G Ethernet Adapter

Reviews: Networking

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Richard Poelling
Kurtis
Actiontec
Jun. 19, 2005

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Security

This is the part where I rag on the poor security of wireless devices. This one is no exception. Without support for WPA, I am really disappointed. WPA has been around long enough that it should be incorporated by now. There are too many known weaknesses with WEP to let it proliferate like this. With that said, I seriously doubt the people using this device will ever really be in a position to have their WEP hacked anyway, but it's the principle of the matter. Also of note is that I attempted to use an ASCII WEP key and that failed miserably. I am unsure what the problem was, but when I entered the WEP key in its HEX format, the device connected without fail.

Testing

For testing the throughput I utilized a program called Qcheck that is distributed by IXIA. This free utility allows for the determination of response time (latency) and throughput. To do this, the program has to be installed on all machines used in the test. The program runs as a service called Endpoint in the background. It enables you to test from either direction on any two machines that it is installed on, (i.e. A to B, or B to A). All throughput testing was done with a 1,000 KB setting in Qcheck. The scores are an average of 20 runs, 10 runs from the server to wireless connection and another from the wireless connection to server.

Throughput was tested using an open connection (no encryption) and 128-bit WEP encryption. Although I don't recommend the use of an open system, this was done to determine if there was any performance hits incurred by the encryption. As expected, I got similar results from both, about 23 Mbps, although nothing near the 54 Mbps this device was advertised as. I will say that the speed was consistent with other standard 802.11g products I have reviewed.

Once a connection was established, I had no problems maintaining it. I attempted to transfer about 5 GB of data from a server to the local machine. These were large ISO files and windows informed me it would take about 45 minutes to complete. All files transferred properly and fully without any errors.

Now obviously the connection worked on a computer, but this device really is not meant just for computers. If you wanted to make you computer wireless, it would be far easier to just buy a PCI network card anyway. What this device is really good for is network appliances. To test this I decided to make my MP3 receiver wireless. This is a small device which hooks directly into my wired network and pulls MP3 music off a central server. Bandwidth is not an issue since it has no problem with a 10Mb connection. The 20+ Mb of the wireless should handle it well. I removed the Ethernet jack from the back of the device and plugged the Actiontec bridge into it. Since both the MP3 receiver and bridge already had IP addresses, they worked right away. I powered up the receiver and pushed play. There was no distortion or lag and the connection performed well. This is the type of arrangement that suits this device best.

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Impressions & Installation
Page 3: Security & Testing
Page 4: Quality Check & Conclusion

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