John Navas <spamfilter0@navasgroup.com> hath wroth:

>Buffalo. Also sold at Best Buy. Arguably the best of the affordable
>products.

Ok, I like to argue.

I resold a WHR-HP-G54 to a customer to get some experience with the
products.
<http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=115&categoryid=29>
What immediately caught my attention was the bogus hype claiming
"Wireless-G MIMO Performance* Router & Access Point".
There's nothing MIMO about this router. The accompanying footnote
explaining the abuse of the term MIMO explains:
*This product uses a two antenna/single high power transmitter
technology. It is not designed to anticipated 802.11n standards.
Based on Buffalo Technology outdoor tests (see accompanying chart),
this product outperforms two radio/three antenna MIMO technology
beyond certain distances. Buffalo Technology testing also shows that
this product equals or exceeds the performance of two radio/two
antenna MIMO technology at all distances.

In other words, they claim that they use of a higher power transmitter
allows their marketting department to abuse the term MIMO in an
apparent attempt to cash in on the lastest buzzword and acronym. Never
mind that even the IEEE can't figure out what constitutes MIMO.

Of course, a different page modifies the claims somewhat:
<http://www.buffalotech.com/products/highpower.php>
*This product uses a two antenna/single high power transmitter
technology. It is not designed to anticipated 802.11n standards.
Based on Buffalo Technology outdoor tests (see accompanying chart),
this product outperforms two radio/three antenna MIMO technology
beyond certain distances. Buffalo Technology testing also shows that
this product equals or exceeds the performance of two radio/two
antenna MIMO technology at all distances. When operating in
High-Speed Mode, this Wi-Fi device achieves an actual throughput of
up to 34.1 Mbps, which is the equivalent throughput of a system
following 802.11g protocol and operating at a signaling rate of 125
Mbps. Actual data rate, features and performance may vary depending
on your computer system, the environment and other factors.

I would be really interested in knowing how they performed this test
as it's not possible to lock the signaling rate in firmware to
125Mbits/sec, only to 54Mbit/sec. Also, if you look at the lower
right of the graph, you'll note that one of the client PC used was
running Windoze XP with only 112MBytes of RAM. I don't think so. They
were also using XP SP1 which has serious wireless driver problems not
present in SP2. The test was apparently conducted in 2005, but SP2
has been available since Aug 2004. Hmmm....

It's too soon for me to tell if this router is a winner or loser. So
far, the range is quite a bit better than the BEFW11S4v2 that it
replaced. I disabled auto channel selection because it was causing
wireless disconnects. I also disabled Turbo-G because there were no
Turbo-G client radios in the system. 802.11b compatibility is on so I
can use my 802.11b only PDA (XV6700). AOSS turned itself on without
invitation twice, so I disabled it. I had a problem running both the
internal antenna and an external panel antennas. My PDA would
sometimes connect using the wrong antenna on the router (judging by
the indicated signal strength), so I disabled diversity reception.

So far, other than the advertising hype, it looks good.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558