Introduction

Continuing with out never-ending pile of wireless products, we have a nifty piece of hardware in our labs today. The D-Link DWL-650 802.11b wireless standard compliant PC Card for laptops is a great device if you want easy internet access at any point in your house or office. Also, it's a great thing to see the dazed look in your friends' faces when you're packing a laptop through the house downloading movies. There are many companies that now manufacture 802.11b compliant products as of today. This is supposed to be a bad thing? Not really, since the IEEE 802.11b protocol is standard, you can have one company's access point and another one's receiver and it'll work just fine, they are all compatible with each other. In fact, just to test that out, we have a special treat at the end where we use Sohoware's Access Point with D-Link's USB and PC Card receivers. Back to the hardware of the hour, we talked about how having a wireless laptop is a cool thing but we didn't mention it's convenience. If you like lounging outside or just work from home, it's easy to get sidetracked and suddenly you find yourself in front of the TV with the computer in the other room. Having a wireless connection to the internet is convenient because you never have to be too far away from your work. Also, it's really a good thing to be ready to work anywhere in the house, a real productivity killer app. So without further procrastination, we'll get along with our review of the D-Link DWL-650 802.11b wireless PC Card.

IEEE 802.11b Wireless Area Network Standard In A Nutshell

A Wireless LAN (WLAN) is basically a Local Area Network, which uses radio signals rather than the conventional wiring of Ethernet and Fiber Optics. The origins of 802.11 were in the corporate world in which companies needed a way to connect their massive base networks to a smaller group of client computers. This allowed the client computers to use the full resources and data of the base network and vice versa. When the wireless standard was first introduced as 802.11 4 years ago, many companies embraced it and made products that were not proprietary but shared the standard so you could interchange units from various companies. Have a D-Link access point and a Linksys adapter and they will work together thanks to the standard. Why hasn't it become popular so far? The 802.11 only had a maximum speed of 1-2 Mbps, making it too slow to support activity other than browsing the Internet on. It cannot perform tasks that a LAN network should be capable of. 1Mbps translates to roughly 120kbps, moving large files would take ages and multiplayer gaming will be lagged. While adoption of the 802.11 was slow in the corporate world, it caught some fans in the home networking world who just wanted to share Internet access and printers. Last year, the IEEE introduced the 802.11b standard, upping the transmission frequency to 2.4GHz and also the speed to a hearty 11Mbps at peak throughput. This makes it more feasible for companies to deploy in their networks as it reaches and sometimes surpasses the speeds of a 10Base-T network. The 802.11b standard also makes wireless a great choice in the home as multiplayer gaming and file transfer speeds will also be greatly enhanced. The 802.11b standard is backwards compatible with earlier 802.11 standards. To get a better understanding of how the network standard works, please visit this site.

Specs

DWL-650 Wireless PC Card Standards IEEE 802.11b WiFi Certified Adapter Type PC Card Type-II slot Protocols TCP/IP IPX/SPX NetBEUI NDIS3 NDIS4 DHCP System Requirements IBM compatible notebook with Cardbus Controller Supported OS Windows 98 Windows ME Windows 2000 Windows NT 4 Data Security 64/128-bit WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) Encryption Data Rate Mbps/channel 11 : CCK 5.5 : CCK 2 : DQPSK 1 : DBSK Key Management Automatic Dynamic Key Allocation (ADKA) through public key Range Indoor - per cell approximately 114 to 328 feet Outdoor - per cell approximately 328 to 984 feet Diagnostic LED Power Network Link Activity Power Specifications Operating Voltage: 3.3V, 5V Power Consumption TX consumption: <350mA RX consumption: <250mA Sleep Mode power consumption: 17mA Transmit Power Nominal Temp. Range: 17 dBm Extended Temp. Range: 14 dBm min. Transmit Power, 2.7v to 3v: 14 dBm min. Receive Sensitivity Nominal Temp Range: 1 Mbps 10-5 BER @ -90 dBm, minimum 5.5 Mbps 10-5 BER @ -87 dBm, minimum 11 Mbps 10-5 BER @ -84 dBm, minimu Extended Temp Range: 1 Mbps 10-5 BER @ -84 dBm, minimum 5.5 Mbps 10-5 BER @ -81 dBm, minimum 11 Mbps 10-5 BER @ - 78 dBm, minimum Network Architecture Supports Ad-Hoc Mode (Peer-to-Peer without Access Point) or Infrastructure Mode (Communications to wired networks via Access Points with Roaming) Compliant with IEEE 802.11b Standards Antenna Internal patch antenna supporting diversity Mobility: Seamless roaming across cell boundaries within access point range Frequency Range 2.4 - 2.4835 GHz, Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) Operating Channels 1-11 United States (FCC) 1-11 Canada (DOC) 1-14 Japan (MKK) 1-13 Europe (Except Spain and France) (ETSI) Physical Dimensions L = 110 mm W = 54 mm H = 6 mm Temperature Operating Temperature: -10°C to 55°C Storage Temperature: -20°C to 75°C Humidity Maximum up to 95% Non-condensing Emissions FCC CE Safety UL

First impressions

By having past experiences with wireless products, I had a wireless network already established in my home so it wasn't a big hassle to set up everything to work right. In fact, all we needed was a PC Card for the trust Sony VAIO. First off, I would like to say the new packaging and boxes for D-Link products within the past year has improved dramatically from the past. Out are the impersonal, plain, and boring boxes for their products and in are the new boxes with good colors and a personal touch (always people on the cover of the box now enjoying their new product). Enough with all the aesthetics of the product. Well, one more thing, the PC Card looks really good and modern compared to other units from 3Com and Sohoware which are just rectangles. The DWL-650 is actually molded to be easy to pull out and also look good when using it on laptops that look good. Aside from looks, there are other things going for the PC Card. With great documentation and easy to follow installation instructions, the DWL-650 is a well-rounded card. I really shouldn't say that before I begin the performance testing so we'll see at the end.

Installation

Installation was really not that hard. The manual recommends you install the software before installing the hardware. I tried it that way and I also installed the hardware before the software and it worked just fine both ways. The installer is CD only, which is fine for most laptops, but there are many notebooks (such as my VAIO Superslim) that doesn't have a CD-ROM drive. It would have been nice to see a diskette version of the drivers included. Installation adds the driver software along with a utility that monitors the strength of the wireless connection also lets you configure the adapter. We installed the adapter and integrated it into a network powered by the D-Link DI-711 wireless router. We would like to add right now that you will not NEED an access point if you have 2 or more computers connected wirelessly. There is a mode called ADHOC which will let 2 or more wireless enabled computers to interface with each other directly, eliminating the access point altogether. This is a good money saver but the convenience of the access point, especially if you have broadband outweigh the extra costs. Also, you have the ability to specify IP's for the network in each node and configure IP's manually but it's recommended that you leave everything in automatic, that way the "plug and play" will kick in and everything will be done for you. As soon as the laptop powered up with the PC Card installed, it took a few seconds to detect the network and as soon as that was done, I had internet access on the laptop from anywhere in range. It was a rather easy and painless installation.

Usage

This is the fun part. In the name of "work" we hauled around the laptop all day, downloading from various parts of the network. Network latency and receptions were major parts in our research on this unit. By using the PC Card, we were able to get internet access and network access from virtually any part of the testing area, in a 300ft or less radius. Actually, the radius seemed a little bit less than that since there were quite a few obstructions in the way of the signal. The unit does do a good job of keeping the signal strength up thanks to the integrated antenna but there were some times when the latency and response time grew a bit too much for our tastes. Also we noticed that there was a little signal cutoff when we used in very close proximity to other computers or devices that generate a lot of radio interference. This is expected and forwarded in the manual. Connections have been up 100% of the time without any intermittent failures so that's a really good sign of a stable network.

Performance

This is the part we've all been waiting for, the performance section of the review. We all know that convenience is nothing if the connection is slower than a dead snail. It's performance is on par with what we've seen with the USB units and it's not bad at all. Latency in internet games are minimal but sometimes noticeable but the connections and consistent and stable. On a side note: using this product will not give you brain damage or cancer any more than a cell phone will. Your brain will not absorb all the data floating around your head generated from the AP because in all likelihood there is 10 times more data floating around your head from other sources such as TV stations, radio stations, phones, etc… Dispel those rumors because you will not be adversely affected by having radio signals all around. Just like the benchmarks for the USB unit, we were never able to reach higher than 70% signal strength; we were usually at 54-56% which is very good but don't expect it to get higher than that on a normal base. So all tests were performed in real-world conditions at "Very Good" signal strength. As for the tests, I performed them with a host computer running Windows 2000 with a 10/100 D-Link Ethernet Card connected to a 10/100 Ethernet switch and the client connected wirelessly running Windows98.

File-transfer speed test

Again, file transfer speeds are really the most important in determining a network for the home or office. In the first test, I transferred a 46.1MB MPEG movie of Britney Spears TO the host computer at a rate of 3.6-4.8Mbps on various tries. This was the same test I ran in my previous review.

Transfers FROM the host to the computer were the same on most occasions, not surprisingly.

100MB of various files of various sizes transferred at a rate of 2.2Mbps-3.2Mbps, a good rate of speed but not as fast as the USB unit. Although it's lower than the rated 11Mbps, it's still within acceptable and accepted limits as nothing ever really reached its maximum speed in the world of networking.

SiSoft testing compared it to a 10Mbps network at Full Duplex but not quite as fast. Pretty good for a wireless network rated at 11Mbps.

Latency Test

In Quake3, pings ranged from 20-60 during intranet play and 80-220 during Internet play which is higher than average but not by much, you will notice it minimally if at all.

Pros & Cons

• Great convenience
• Good performance
• Good documentation
• Great software

• Expensive compared to wired alternatives
• No Diskette Installation

Conclusion

Wireless internet and networking is where it's at. Taking place in new colleges, companies, and even in your neighbor's home… 802.11b is here to stay in a big way. There are plenty of uses for this networking tool and a lot of them are great innovations of the past coupled with bold visions of the future. As you find yourself faced with as daunting a task a wiring a 2 or 3 story home with Cat5, you'll be happy to spend the extra couple of dollars for a wireless network where nothing is out of reach and nothing is obstructive for you to see. They really have this figured out, if you need a bigger area to host, add more Access Points, it's a nifty idea and also a good one which will pay off, trust me. I am personally a fan of the 802.11b standard and I recommend this to all my friends. So basically, for the best and easiest way to "wire" your house wirelessly, this PC Card is for you. Couple it with a good Access Point and you have yourself a good, stable, wireless network in which you can work from anywhere doing anything.

Rating: 9/10 SystemLogistics

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