Good Wi-Fi Pair

Pair a NetGear RangeMax 240 Wireless router with its WPNT511 Card-Bus PC Card client and you’re in for quite a shock. The pair breaks wired networking’s lock on 100-Mbps transfers. On the tests, at distances up to 120 feet the two even beat the stunningly fast Linksys SRX 400 and its laptop adapter. The router/PC Card combination hits more than 103 Mbps at 10 feet, exceeding the throughput of wired Fast Ethernet. In fact, data transfer is a remarkable 95.3 Mbps at 60 feet—still on a par with Fast Ethernet.

Even at 160 feet, throughput is 22.4 Mbps significantly faster than with any wireless technology. Netgear didn’t sacrifice ease of use or features for speed, though. The bundled software and the router’s Web-based configuration interface are both intuitive. And the hardware packs in all the features you would expect; port forwarding and triggering, VPN pass-through, dynamic DNS, service blocking, UPnP, and many more.

The wireless security choices are the standard WEP, WPA, or WPA2 with preshared key. All that’s lacking as with the Linksys SRX 400, is effective parental controls. For anyone streaming multimedia simultaneously to several wireless clients (or engaging in other bandwidth hogging activities), this is the fastest and easiest to use wireless hardware currently available.