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D-Link Air DWL-120 and DWL-500 Wireless Network Adapters
By Kelly Lu - April 10, 2001
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Networking has never been an easy business. It's not only the fact that the Windows networking facilities have never really worked the way they're supposed to, but the main pain comes when you've got two computers in different rooms-or better yet, on different floors. You wanna connect this computer?-hole through wall. You wanna connect that computer?-hole through ceiling/floor. Instead of just having to configure the technology side of it, you also had to make changes to your actual home-not fun.
Many companies have tried to ease the pain of setting up your own network at home or at the office. They have introduced different methods, such as enabling you to connect your computer to a network through the phone line or even through an A/C outlet. Sure, this will help to eliminate drilling holes through your walls, but both of these methods still haven't eliminated one of the key components in making a network hassle-free-the wires. Still having these wires means that you can only connect your notebook to the network in a certain place without having the freedom of using it anywhere you want. Plus, for those of you who don't have a phone jack in your room for telephone networking on your desktop PC, you're-for a lack of better words-screwed!
So your only solution to the wire problem? Go wireless! One problem, though, is that wireless technologies haven't always been perfect. Sure, they give you the freedom, but wireless networking in the past usually meant connection speeds of only 2Mbps--on a good day. Wireless technologies use spread spectrum radio waves to send and receive data. Thus, although the "spreading" process makes it much better than conventional radio, they are still susceptible to interference from any other electronic device. Because of this, it would have been good enough if one could achieve the rated 2Mbps, but rarely did it do that.
Now, however, with the introduction of the IEEE 802.11b standard, all that has changed. The new standard introduces some significant improvements over the older standard mentioned above, but none more than the speed increase. Using IEEE 802.11b devices, one can achieve a maximum of 11Mbps, which is very good, especially when a regular network goes for only 10Mbps. Although the specifications for the new standard claim that it is far less susceptible to interference than the old standard because it uses Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS for short) rather than Frequency Hopping, how close to the rated 11Mbps can we get under regular conditions is another story and is something that we're going to find out today.
 Enter D-Link. A company who's origins comes from producing some of the finest networking products around, a company who recently have seemed to move away from their roots of being a networking-only company and who introduced a swarm of new digital media products such as their DSC-350 dual-mode digital camera and DMP-CD100 MP3/CD player. We've taken a look at these products in the past, but we've never actually reviewed any of their networking products, which are supposed to be what they're most known for. Today, however, is our first look at a group of networking products by D-Link, although much different from traditional networking products.
D-Link has a complete family of network adapters, access points and gateways for any type of application possible in their Air line of wireless products. We've managed to receive a few of their wireless products. We'll start today with their PCI (DWL-500) and USB (DWL-120) wireless network adapters.
 On to: IEEE 802.11b Introduced
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