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By John Morris Executive editor, CNET Reviews (9/20/02) The news of Microsoft's new line of home networking products, officially released yesterday, no doubt came as a blow to smaller companies, including D-Link, Linksys, and NetGear, which had pioneered the category and rapidly driven costs down. Microsoft's new hardware competes with theirs feature for feature and nearly dollar for dollar. But while these networking veterans make products that anyone can afford, Microsoft has come up with home networking equipment that virtually anyone can use. In all, Microsoft's new line consists of 10 wireless and wired Ethernet products, but the most interesting are the 802.11b, or Wi-Fi, gadgets. These include the $149 MN-500 base station and the $79 MN-510 USB desktop adapter and MN-520 PC Card notebook adapter. Combinations of the same components are also available in two $219 kits. I've been using the base station and notebook adapter in my home--a 75-year-old brick-and-plaster fortress that has been the downfall of many wireless products--for a couple of weeks now. Bill wants to hold your hand Taking a page from Apple's AirPort, Microsoft calls the MN-500 by the user-friendly name "base station." In fact, the MN-500 is several products in one, including a gateway or router, a wireless access point, a four-port Ethernet hub, and a firewall. You connect your cable or DSL modem to the base station's WAN port, then connect your desktop to the base station using either a standard Ethernet cable or wirelessly via the USB adapter. The base station competes directly with products such as the D-Link AirPlus DI-614+, the NetGear MR314, and the Linksys EtherFast Wireless AP. The key difference in Microsoft's version is (surprise!) the software.
More important, the setup simplifies the process of securing your wireless network. If you've ever popped an adapter into your notebook and seen your next-door neighbor's network pop up on the screen, then you know that most wireless networks are open books. But configuring security settings can be so complicated that many users--including me, I confess--simply skip over them. In fact, many gateways leave basic security measures off by default to avoid tech-support headaches. Freeloading neighbors are out of luck Microsoft's setup solves this problem in several ways. First, it prompts you to change not only the network name, but also the password for the base station so that only authorized users can get to it. Competing products come with default names and passwords, such as "admin," that most people never bother to change. This essentially leaves your network wide open. Second, the program leaves 128-bit encryption, also known as WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) on by default and generates a key for you. All computers on your network have to have this key; without it, traffic on the network is just gibberish.
And finally, like all wireless gateways, Microsoft's base station includes a hardware firewall, for warding off intruders, and NAT (Network Address Translation), which hides the Internet addresses of the PCs on your network. Even with all of these security measures in place, wireless home networks still aren't foolproof, as Robert Vamosi explains in a recent Security Watch column. But without them, you're walking a wireless tightrope. All of this may sound complicated, but in reality, the setup is just a wizard with a series of boxes to check and basic information to enter--all of the hard stuff happens invisibly in the background. When you're done, you can put all of the network settings on an included floppy disk and use that to automatically configure every other PC on the network. I was using an ultraportable notebook without a floppy drive, so instead, I chose to print the settings and enter them manually. The entire process, including setting up my notebook and installing the PC Card adapter, took about 15 minutes. The only complication, in my case, was that my cable ISP looks for the MAC address of the Ethernet card in my desktop PC, not the base station's default MAC address. To get the thing working right, I had to use Microsoft's Base Station Management tool to tell the base station to "clone" this address. According to Microsoft, few major cable ISPs require this step, but if you happen to run into it, this process is documented in the manual and on Microsoft's broadband networking site. In addition to the Base Station Management tool, Microsoft includes a Broadband Network Utility, a system tray applet that shows you basic information about the network such as the speed, signal strength, and other computers on the network. Performance hit? Pshaw Though Wi-Fi is capable of speeds of up to 11Mbps, you get only about half of that in the real world. In CNET Labs' tests, the base station's 4.9Mbps throughput was a little slower than competing products we've tested recently, such as the Belkin Wireless Cable/DSL Gateway Router and the HP Wireless Gateway hn200w. But in my home, the throughput has been more than adequate for my purposes, and even though the signal strength is low, I can use it reliably from just about anywhere on both floors; previous wireless gateways I've tried have struggled to reach much outside the home office where my desktop is located. Based on my own experience setting up and using the MN-500 base station and MN-520 PC Card adapter, I can't say that Microsoft has made wireless networking completely foolproof, but it has sure taken a huge step in the right direction. It's about time someone made progress on fixing the mess that is home networking.
John Morris is an executive editor for hardware and software coverage at CNET. Have a question for him? Let us know!
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