One of the best ways to make an agnostic repeater

Author's Rating:

Pros: Easy config, Very good signal strength, Replaceable antennas, cheap.

Cons: It isn't free.

The Bottom Line: 
It's cheap, it's effective, and can be used in conjunction with a WET11 to make a cheap agnostic repeater. I have no reservations about this unit. Buy it.

Author's Review
OK, so I have one of those new handy dandy Compaq X1000 notebooks. It has a 1.3ghz Centrino CPU and built-in wifi. I've always had wifi (802.11b) wireless access to the internet in my home, and it's always worked well.

At work, the compliance folks are getting very scrutinizing about the traffic going across our firewalls and proxy servers. In fact, any unauthorized machine put on our network is grounds for disciplinary action up to and including termination. With the financial markets being what they are post-enron, I suppose it's justified. But wireless access is a big no-no, much less hard-wiring my notebook to the corporate network.

Now, at my building in NYC there are several open-access wifi nodes. Using my notebook and a copy of Netstumbler, I was able to find 6 of them. However, my desk on one side of the building is inaccessible to all of them. The only thing on my side of the building is the hudson river, truth be told. So what was I to do?

I used a WAP11 at home as my access point for wireless access. I did some browsing through the manual and found that the WAP11 is capable of being a repeater. However, there was only one problem: It would only repeat signals from another WAP11. After doing some long and hard research on access points that repeat wifi, I found that ALL the affordable access points that work as repeaters will only repeat signals from their own brands. Since the only open access points in my area were Apple Airport access points, the linksys WAP11 wasn't an option if I wanted a standalone repeater....

So I did a little experimentation. A friend of mine headed down to J&R and purchased a Linksys WET11 Ethernet bridge. After finding a page on the Linksys website that documented "extending the range of your wifi signal", we were able to create the agnostic repeater I so desperately wanted. After hard-wiring the WET11 to the WAP11, we were up and running in no time.

About the WAP11:

The WAP11 on its own is simply an access point. It is NOT a router. It will not block or forward ports, or do NAT (network address translation). In order to get that kind of functionality in an all-in-one unit, you should look into one of their router products for wireless. The function of the WAP11 on your network is to plug into a wired hub or router to give wireless access to your local network.

The WAP11 includes a power cable, an ethernet cable, and not much else. It includes a CD to configure it, but it's not really required because it includes a web interface that does everything you need. When you first plug in the WAP11 to your router or hub/switch, it's accessible by using an IP address on the 192.168.1.X subnet. All you need to do is configure a PC to be on the ip address 192.168.1.10, then open a browser and browse to http://192.168.1.251 - this will prompt you for a password (which is 'admin' by default, and you should change it RIGHT away). Once you're in, you can configure the following options:

DHCP - the WAP11 can be a DHCP *CLIENT*. It can get its IP address via a DHCP server on your network. It will NOT give OUT IP addresses, it will only allow itself to obtain one. DHCP stands for "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol", which basically means it will automagically assign a machine an ip address without requiring any manual configuration. I personally prefer to leave this at the default value.

AP Name - You can configure a name for your access point. Note that this is different from the "SSID" value. The AP name can be as descriptive as you like - for instance, you can mark its location here so if you have multiple WAP11's you know which one you're configuring.

SSID - This is the SSID, or Service Set Identifier. This designates the name listed when users are searching for an access point. It's basically a name that identifies your NETWORK, unlike the "AP Name" field which identifies the access point itself.

WEP - Wireless Encryption Protocol. The near-useless encryption that most access points are capable of. I disable WEP because of the overhead it uses. The bottom line is, if someone wants to break your WEP key using brute-force tools readily available on the linux platform, there's NOTHING you can do to stop them. WEP is inherently flawed, and as such WEP is all but useless. It will only keep out hackers with rudimentary knowledge. Several websites document how to crack WEP in under an hour, but I won't share those here. I leave it disabled and prevent access to my AP a different way. However, if you wish to use it, it allows you to generate or enter a passphrase easily.

AP mode - Here is where you configure the mode of your access point. It can be a simple access point to your network, an access point client (which allows you to use this unit as a bulky wireless network interface), a wireless bridge (to bridge 2 linksys wireless networks together), a point-to-multipoint bridge (to bridge 1 network to several others), and a wireless repeater (which will repeat the signals off another linksys access point to extend range). Note that ALL but the generic "access point" settings will ONLY function when connecting to other linksys WAP11 units.

Backup/Restore - Once you have your unit configured, you can back up your settings and restore them if you somehow mess them up. This allows you to experiment.

There are also some advanced options that are useful. For instance, you can restrict access by MAC address (MAC meaning "Media Access Control", a unique ID every network card has), and disable the broadcast of your WAP11's SSID. You can also send the AP's status messages to a standard unix syslog daemon, which most people will find useless.

The WAP11 also generates simple statistics that allow you to monitor the utilization of your access point.

So how does it WORK?

I must say, quite well. The WAP11 has 2 diversity antennas which are configurable via the web interface. You can have them set to diversity mode, or you can configure each antenna individually for send/receive - or disable one or both altogether. The antennas themselves use standard nut connectors, allowing you to change the antennas if you wish. There are a lot of antenna solutions out there to extend your wifi range, though the documented range of this unit (500ft) is sufficient for most users. I live in a brick house, and m WAP11 reaches 100ft outdoors easily through the brick wall. While I haven't tested it under more rigorous circumstances, it definitely performs adequately for my needs.

When using this AP with my Roadrunner connection, I easily max out my download cap speed of 2.5 mbit/sec. At work, where I'm using the WET11/WAP11 brand-agnostic repeater combo, I see the same results. I'm using the WAP11 connected to a WET11 connecting wirelessly to an open access point in downtown manhattan, and I still see 250k/sec downloading from his or her roadrunner connection. And it cost very little to do it all.

I have absolutely no reservations recommending this unit. It has exceeded my expectations. It never needs rebooting either.