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• Linksys Wireless-b Access Point Set Up
• Linksys Wireless-b Access Point Wap11

Okay, in response to all other negative reviews: bunk. I have a WAP11 (and am purchasing a second for my work place), and out of the box it is a breeze to set up.

I have a house separate from my garage/office, and running a wire between the two for internet access is impossible/prohibitive. I set up my WAP11 with my main network and was able to get a good signal with my laptop and my WPC11 (Linksys) PCMCIA card. However, the card orientation is not the best for longer distances.

Antenna orientation with these units is everything! On the farthest reaches of my garage (100 ft from the WAP) I received no signal.

But, when I tilted my laptop on end (a bad typing position:-) ) suddenly I receive a 40% signal strength. I began to do a little research and talked with a couple of antenna manufacturers. The summation was that this unit is VERY extendable if you want to drop a little extra money on an antenna. The antennas on the WAP11 are removable and a much more powerful antenna (with pigtail) can be added. However, I found this to be unnecessary. I went ahead and decided to try the WUSB11 (Linksys) and see if the 'proper antenna orientation' thingy really was the trouble.

Out of the box, it worked. Throughout my house, and out to the farthest reaches of my garage and beyond! I did find a couple of weak areas, but moving the WUSB11 (it is on a 6ft USB cable) around a bit got me the signal strength I desired. The WAP11 comes with the unit (with two removable antennas, an important feature you don't find described anywhere, even in the LinkSys literature), a power supply, a CD-ROM with driver and installation software (really unbelievably easy setup, and please, please turn on the WEP feature!), and an easy-install guide. As far as interference?

I have a 2.4Ghz cordless phone and have yet to notice anything (jury is still out), but so far, so good. Really a terrific unit for the price. Just be aware that there are limitations with the out-of-the-box unit and you will be fine. I definitely recommend this unit. After purchasing thier 4-port DSL router, which I really like, I thought I'd give Linksys another try with the WAP11. I wish now I hadn't. The product shipped with only 40(64) bit WEP encryption, which was a surprise to me since most everything has moved to 128bit encryption.

No problems, Linksys had a firmware upgrade which offered the 128, so I downloaded it and installed it. Then my problems began. The firmware install utility reported it did not complete properly, and subsequent tries failed completely. When I tried to access the WAP11 with the SNMP tool, it failed. I then tried the USB interface tool, which worked, and the unit appeared to have upgraded properly despite the report from the utility. (I have since discovered many other people had the same problem in upgrading the fw. Did Linksys even test this??) After waiting forever on Linksys' tech support queue, I was greeted with a tech support person, who as I suspected, knows less about networking than I do, and appeared to know even less than me about Linksys products.

He sent me begrudgingly down a few blind alleys, which I informed him were not the solution, only to find out I was right. The reason I called tech support? It was to get the SNMP utility to work, which is the only way to limit the MAC addresses. The solution?

Disable the password access to the WAP. Brilliant huh! Anyways since then, the unit is working, however anytime I am transfering large amounts of data, the WAP will lock up, pretty consistently too. Then it must be power-cycled to work again. I think I'll be returning this unit and try another brand.

Okay, in response to all other negative reviews: bunk. I have a WAP11 (and am purchasing a second for my work place), and out of the box it is a breeze to set up. I have a house separate from my garage/office, and running a wire between the two for internet access is impossible/prohibitive. I set up my WAP11 with my main network and was able to get a good signal with my laptop and my WPC11 (Linksys) PCMCIA card. However, the card orientation is not the best for longer distances. Antenna orientation with these units is everything! On the farthest reaches of my garage (100 ft from the WAP) I received no signal.

But, when I tilted my laptop on end (a bad typing position:-) ) suddenly I receive a 40% signal strength. I began to do a little research and talked with a couple of antenna manufacturers. The summation was that this unit is VERY extendable if you want to drop a little extra money on an antenna. The antennas on the WAP11 are removable and a much more powerful antenna (with pigtail) can be added.

However, I found this to be unnecessary. I went ahead and decided to try the WUSB11 (Linksys) and see if the 'proper antenna orientation' thingy really was the trouble. Out of the box, it worked. Throughout my house, and out to the farthest reaches of my garage and beyond!

I did find a couple of weak areas, but moving the WUSB11 (it is on a 6ft USB cable) around a bit got me the signal strength I desired. The WAP11 comes with the unit (with two removable antennas, an important feature you don't find described anywhere, even in the LinkSys literature), a power supply, a CD-ROM with driver and installation software (really unbelievably easy setup, and please, please turn on the WEP feature!), and an easy-install guide. As far as interference? I have a 2.4Ghz cordless phone and have yet to notice anything (jury is still out), but so far, so good. Really a terrific unit for the price. Just be aware that there are limitations with the out-of-the-box unit and you will be fine.

I definitely recommend this unit. I read with great interest your review dated july 2002. The Tweaking you describe is just what my Wap 11 needs.

It barely makes contact with the Wusb 11 at the other end of the house; approx. And through at least 4-5 walls, closets and kitchen cabinets.

Most of the time the link quality is 20-26% which is not enough to sustain a download although some surfing is possible. On good days we get to 33% but it reminds me of the days of B&W TV, rabbit ears and struggling to get Boston and Providence Stations while down the Cape.

I was considering getting a second Wap 11 and placing it halfway between when I read about the 5x increase in power available provided you know SNMP code which I don't. Too bad you didn't leave your WEB site or e-mail in the review as I have found it impossible to find either. I may end up having to purchase that second unit after all. After purchasing thier 4-port DSL router, which I really like, I thought I'd give Linksys another try with the WAP11.

I wish now I hadn't. The product shipped with only 40(64) bit WEP encryption, which was a surprise to me since most everything has moved to 128bit encryption. No problems, Linksys had a firmware upgrade which offered the 128, so I downloaded it and installed it. Then my problems began.

The firmware install utility reported it did not complete properly, and subsequent tries failed completely. When I tried to access the WAP11 with the SNMP tool, it failed. I then tried the USB interface tool, which worked, and the unit appeared to have upgraded properly despite the report from the utility. (I have since discovered many other people had the same problem in upgrading the fw. Did Linksys even test this??) After waiting forever on Linksys' tech support queue, I was greeted with a tech support person, who as I suspected, knows less about networking than I do, and appeared to know even less than me about Linksys products. He sent me begrudgingly down a few blind alleys, which I informed him were not the solution, only to find out I was right.

The reason I called tech support? It was to get the SNMP utility to work, which is the only way to limit the MAC addresses.

The solution? Disable the password access to the WAP.

Brilliant huh! Anyways since then, the unit is working, however anytime I am transfering large amounts of data, the WAP will lock up, pretty consistently too. Then it must be power-cycled to work again.

I think I'll be returning this unit and try another brand. I recently purchased the WAP11 with a WPC11 and discovered that it lives up to the hype. I love being able to connect to all network resources from anywhere inside (or outside) the house. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the WAP/WPC combo provides a full 11 Mb speed. Setup, installation, and configuration took a couple of hours and the only problem I had was with a bad CAT5 cable (from my junk box).

In fact, the only thing I find wrong with the product was they don't supply the CAT5 cable to connect to a wired network. When I bought this item from 'alectrics' it was very cheap, about $20. Now I see the price is up I would get a more modern unit. I alredy owned 3 WAP11's so I needed this to be compatable in a relay type system. Linksys is notroious for having incompatablities between different version of the same model, so beware if you need special features as you may need matched versions, not just matched models.

I use this WAP11 as a range extender for my other WAP11's and it works very well. BECAUSE the versions are an exact match! Don't ignore this warning, I did and it cost me to make it right. A note about buying from 'alectrics'. I had given them a good review (5) but they kept sending me messages begging for a 5 rating. After the third message in two months I withdrew my reccomendation. I bought the WAP11 (v 2.2) plus a wireless Linksys PC card NIC and a PCI NIC: all for home use.

The WAP setup is pretty straightforward with an excellent Web interface. I set it up with 128 bit WEP encryption and MAC address filtering to provide at least some basic security. I found the signal strength and range to be better than the SMC WAP I had been testing and certainly preferred the Linksys web interface to the setup utility that came with the SMC. My only cricicism of the Linksys unit is its bulk. Although possibly outside the scope of this review, it may be worth mentioning that I'm very happy with the Linksys WMP11 PCI Wireless NIC that I bought as well. It has an actual real antenna that sticks out of the back of the PC and which can be adjusted to get the optimum signal strength.

The only problem I had was with the Windows XP wireless networking setup utility doing battle with the utility provided with the one that shipped with the card. I suppose I could have let the Windows-provided utility handle the card but, in the end, I unchecked the box that allowed it to manage the card. This let me use the Linksys utility to handle the setup and things were smooth from then on. Signal strength is excellent - much better than from the SMC PCI card I'd been using earlier. Whether this was a function of having the antenna, rather than SMC's back plastic PC-card type protrusion, I don't know. One more thing, Linksys makes easy work of updating drivers, utilities and firmware from its very well-organized web site.

It's worth availing yourself of these updates. I can't understand all the complaints.

I have 4 of these units to bridge my entire network, which spans 6000 square feet over 3 floors. Never a problem with drop signal, interference, etc. All 4 units worked perfectly and has been perfect for 3 straight months.

Setup is not the most intuitive in the world, and I'm convinced that those who had problems didn't set their devices up correctly. Linksys support is really rudementary at best.

Their knowledge level is elementary. Spend a few minutes and read the manual carefully.

Once setup correctly, you'll be real happy. First, do get this product. Once you've got it up and running, it's an amazing thing, and totally hassle-free. Just turn on your laptop nearly anywhere in the house and you're online.

Works fine with laptop suspend and resume, too. You'll never get off the sofa again! But a few reminders. First, make sure that the SSID for both card and access point are the same; mine weren't. (It doesn't matter what they are-'linksys' or 'wireless' or something-just that they agree). Second, don't sweat the IP config too much. I left all the AP values at the default and it worked more-or-less fine (I can't access the AP with the network utility although I can with the USB one, but it seems to nevertheless do its job as promised.

Also, don't expect much from Linksys tech support. They've got nothing useful on their site, they don't answer email, and I couldn't hang on long enough for phone support. But it may not matter: this is not a product that you're going to tinker with once it's up and running. Finally, on range: it's not great, but should be okay for most purposes. In our 3,000 ft house, I can reach most rooms but not one on the other side of the house, one floor up and five walls over. I would think that 100ft and/or 4-5 walls/floors would be a reasonable rule of thumb for a wooden home.

Linksys Wireless-b Access Point Set Up

If all you need is a wireless access point, the WAP11 works great. I bought a second one because there were still some dead areas in our old plaster walled house and I saw that Linksys was touting the 'repeater' function. The WAP11 has the ability to take a signal from another WAP11 and extend it. All you need is a power plug, i.e. It doesn't have to be plugged into the router (you plug it into the router initially for set-up).

Linksys Wireless-b Access Point Wap11

So, I had one WAP11 plugged into the router and the other plugged into a power outlet in the living room. The repeater function does 'work', that is, I now had a good signal in the previous dead zones.

The problem is that the actual throughput or speed of the data was comparable to a 56kbs modem and the access points constantly have to be reset (at least once-a-day). I called Linksys tech support, who had initially told me it would only be slightly slower and probably not noticable, and a different tech said: 'yeah, that's a problem we know about and there is currently no soulution.'

He then tried to give me some crap about a 'possible' firmware upgrade. The second access point is being returned and I am now a D-link customer. I purchased the WAP11 and the WUSB11 wireless adapter and found the original setup to be very easy and reliable.

I'm able to get 'excellent' connection (11Mbps) from downstairs (approx. 20' from the WAP11) and find the internet and network connection to be similar to the connection speed as my hard wired system upstairs. Very nice equipment. One thing all potential buyers should know is that this product is not able to pass the required 128bit encryption data stream needed for several e-commerce sites. Online banking and credit card access are not possible. The recent firmware upgrade is supposed to allow 128bit capability, however, the installation process for this is not good. In fact, Linksys posted the new firmware on 6/22/01, then changed the file to some other utility the next day or so.

The firmware upgrade faulted out after 56% several times and ultimately messed up the EPROM. After many hours of trial and error, I was finally able to get the thing working again. I am able to key the 128 bit data stream now. However, once I power down and reboot, the USB adapter is unable to connect at 128bit. This firmware needs improvement and the connection for 128bit encryption needs to be way more stable and reliable. If you don't need 128bit encryption, this is the perfect wireless solution.