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Our motto is “Test Until You Succeed or Set Fire to Something,” so we plugged in the WL-330 to see what kind of results could be had. No fire came forth, which was good, but the unit does heat up noticeably during extended operation. For the sake of longevity, it should always have good ventilation. An elderly but rugged IBM ThinkPad, equipped with a no-frills PCMCIA 802.11b adapter (TRENDnet TEW-226PC), provided us with a test mule.

The first thing we discovered was that the WL-330’s browser configuration option loaded without requesting a login name/password. That could allow an unauthorized party to change settings. ASUS has amended the issue in the 2.02 and later firmware versions, and after performing a firmware upgrade (to 2.04), a password request was added. Our unit was a pre-production model, so it is possible that shipping units already include a later firmware version, but it is a good thing to check when setting up the device. ASUS also supplies software utilities for configuring the unit, but except for the firmware recovery option, these are not mandatory. All features can be controlled via the browser login.

   

ASUS Device Discovery utility (v15-09A037030 CD-ROM utilities; Ethernet Adapter mode), browser configuration menu (v2.04 firmware; Access Point mode) and the Wireless Ethernet configuration utility.

Thereafter, the WL-330 worked beautifully, and the range was surprisingly good. The ASUS specifications claim up to 40m indoors and a maximum of 457m line-of-sight, and after some experimenting – comprised of Yours Truly wandering outdoors and through the condominium’s exterior hallways, watching a signal strength meter on the laptop display – we are willing to believe it. Distances of 15m or better were obtained, through walls and floors, with the signal strength holding around 75 percent. Only thick steel fire-doors and similar actually cut it off but that is to be expected.

We experimented with encryption (up to five 64- or 128-bit WEP keys allowed) and DHCP vs. static IP, and encountered no problems apart some difficulties getting DHCP to work properly. However that issue seemed to be related to some configuration discrepancies between the WL-330, the Linksys BEFSR41 router/switch to which it was connected, and the TCP/IP settings for the laptop. We didn’t have time to unravel a trifecta, but since everything worked fine otherwise, it is doubtful that the WL-330 was the cause of the problem.

The final test was to run the unit as a Wireless Ethernet Adapter. We were lacking a base station at the time of the review but it seemed fair to at least set up an ad hoc connection. The WL-330 was connected to a desktop PC and synchronized with the laptop, and a single 540MB file was copied from the laptop to the desktop in just under fifteen minutes (0.6MB/s). That works out to 5Mbps or so, which is roughly the peak bandwidth limit for 802.11b data transfer since about half of the 11Mbps space is consumed by protocol overhead. In other words, all was well.

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