Netgear Wifi router WNR834Bn

The world of networks is constantly evolving, mainly due to the mass deployment of wireless networks, more commonly known as WiFi networks. This has come about in the last few years by a large number of home users and companies that have seen this as a technical solution that allows them to deploy to locations that were previously inaccessible.

Multiple standards have been released with different performance, with the 802.11b first of all offering a theoretic speed of 11 Mbit/s and then the 802.11g which improved things to 54 Mbit/s. This previous version started to make things happen thanks to its portability and speed, making WiFi a success – a fact that can be seen in France by the number of internet providers that offer it as part of their internet connections.

The speed of the evolution and the need for faster speeds has led us to the new wireless standard which has been born, the 802.11n. This allows a theoretic speed of 600 Mb/s (against 54 Mbit/s for the g standard) and a range of up to a few hundred meters. This future standard is today still only in the “draft” phase which means that it is not yet completely ratified, although it still has the essentials of the definitive standard. The fact that this standard is not yet completely ratified has not prevented the manufacturers like NETGEAR from releasing their products to the public based on the future standard. According to the manufacturers, it should simply require a simple firmware update in the future to make the device completely compatible with the final 802.11n standard.

NETGEAR, who is one of the biggest manufacturers of network equipment in the world, is based in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley in California. It is an old associate of Nortel Networks, and they have kindly offered us two of their RangeMAX Next devices that are based on the “draft n” standard to exclusively test for them, the WNR 834B router and the WN511B PCMCIA card.

(click to enlarge)

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