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 The Netgear ME102 is designed to link a wired LAN to any wireless equipped kit. This can be useful where it is difficult to continue the wired LAN because of building regulations or logistics. Another use is at home where you may have some PCs networked up and want to add new ones on different levels but don’t want to start dropping cabling from floor to floor.

Installation

Installation is extremely easy even for the networking novice. The back of the ME102 has a single network port which you connect to your hub or router using the supplied high quality network cable. If you don’t want to enable encryption (which to be honest is not recommended) and are happy with the default settings as advised in the manual then that’s about it. It will work.

If you want to play around a bit you can either talk to it via the wired LAN using the supplied SNMP software tools or you can plug it in to a PC using the USB (cable again supplied) port which is also at the back.

Once up and running, the ME102 communicates with any 802.11b/WiFi complaint equipment and seamlessly connects them to the wired network allowing you to share an Internet connection, access drives on other PCs or share a printer on another machine.

Features

The ME102 features 40, 64 or 128 bit WEP encryption which whilst not the most secure thing on the planet, it does help protect your LAN from most attempts at breaking in. As has been highlighted recently with the so called ‘War Chalking’ in the news, there are lots of people out there actively looking for wireless LANs to try and piggy back on for free Internet access. With WEP, you at least stand a fighting chance of keeping them at bay. Of course, you’ll also want a good firewall such as ZoneAlarm to add extra protection.

A slight failing is that the unit does not support closed networks and constantly transmits its SSID which makes it slightly more vulnerable to hacking.

You can have up to 32 users accessing a single ME102 and up to 3 ME102’s can exist on a network so you should have more than enough capability in a small office or home environment.

An excellent feature at this price is that you can use two ME102s to bridge between two different wired LANs. We weren’t able to test this feature though.

The twin aerials are fixed and therefor cannot be replaced with booster antennas to extend the range. They can be swivelled around to optimise the signal though.

A small gripe is that the top contains only a power on LED and a connection LED. It would have been nice to have had a few more to show a wired connection as well as a wireless one to aid with troubleshooting.

The software tools allow you to change various parameters and also provide useful statistics on data throughput. Windows XP is supported as well as most earlier versions.

Performance

The unit performed very well indeed. We used it as a direct swap with an existing wireless access point from another manufacturer.  We had the ME102 and wired LAN 2 floors above our test PC and got a much better signal than with the previous access point we had been using. We managed to get good speeds and unusually for such a cheap unit, the speed didn’t drop much when WEP was enabled. Many similar devices slow down considerably when asked to encrypt but not the ME102. Changing things around such that the test PC was just one floor down showed a 100% signal strength and superb speed. We managed to copy 100Mb in just over 7 minutes which is commendable and up with the very best speed wise.

We next tested the ME102 using a laptop equipped with a Netgear MA401GE PCMCIA 802.11b card. This achieved a better signal strength and managed to keep a connection for even further although the speed was much the same.

Conclusion

The Me102 is a superb device.  It is very fast, has a decent range, looks good and includes everything you need to be up and running at a very affordable price. For home users it comes highly recommended. For office users where high security is a must, you may want to look elsewhere but for most people it makes an ideal addition to your existing LAN. The usefulness of being able to wander about with a laptop and still be connected is not to be underestimated.

Iain Laskey

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