I've tested both the DWL-120 and the DWL-500 at distances of 1m away from the access point, but chances are, you'll want to move the cards at a farther distance than that! Most people look to wireless networking when they need to move around the house or connect computers through different rooms at far away distances, so let's see how they handle things when we move them away from the access point.

I again ran the same tests on the same computers, but this time, I moved the computer where all the network adapters are installed on (the Pentium III 1GHz) to another room. Separated by about 7m with a wall in between, the tests returned to me identical access times, but observe the following:

The DWL-500 dropped by about 6% when moved from 1m to 7m. This is not a very large drop and should be fine for most people. What surprised me, however, was the fact that the transfer rate for the DWL-120 didn't drop at all. This is further evidence of my prediction at the beginning of this review that it would saturate the USB interface, since we can clearly see that it is the USB interface that is the bottleneck and not the adapter itself. The new USB 2.0 standard should correct this situation, but until it becomes adapted, this is what you should be expecting out of any USB 1.1 device.

On to: Conclusion