Buffalo WLI-CB-G54 Review
From Superk
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After spending a good bit of time with my D-Link DWL-650+ card, I found there are much better things in life than that card. Perhaps it's because the card was refurbished instead of brand-new, but I doubt it; too many reports from other people that the same card was frustrating them too in various ways. So I upgraded. I've recently started using the Buffalo WLI-CB-G54 card and while I don't have an 802.11g WAP yet, the results at standard 802.11b level are fantastic!
The WLI-CB-G54 card was a little bit of a risk for me that has both worked out very well and caused a small bit of aggravation as well. First the good parts...
The Good News
When I went looking for a new card I did some pretty extensive research on which card would suit me best. But when it finally came down to actually buying a card, I left it to gut instinct to tell me which was the one I prefered. I thought about continuing with another D-Link "plus" card (the plus means it uses proprietary technology by Texas-Instruments to achieve approximately twice the throughput of standard 802.11b's 11Mbps) since that's what my WAP is, but I was also intrigued with the idea of upgrading to the latest higher speed standard, 802.11g. After looking at the numbers, it didn't make much sense to stick with 'b' when 'g' was only slightly more expensive.
My search took place at CompUSA here in Tucson and unfortunately their offerings are not all that diverse. They had lines from LinkSys, D-Link, Microsoft, Netgear and Buffalo, the latter I had only heard of very recently. What finally drew me to purchase the Buffalo card was it's inclusion of an external antenna port. I've had it on my back-burner to create my own high-gain antennas so this appealed to me as an option for a later date. (If anyone knows where to get connectors to fit this card's external port, please let me know!) All the prices on the 802.11g cards were about the same hovering around $60-$75 after rebates and discounts, etc. This particular card was $60 after the mail-in rebates.
The card itself uses the Broadcom 4306 chipset which seems to be pretty standard with the 'g' cards the CompUSA had available. Other chipsets such as the Atheros and Realtek were available too in other cards along with the PrismGT I noticed in the D-Link ExtremeG card. I know nothing about any of these chipsets, so I can only report on what I've found with the Broadcom set (as a side note, I know there are Linux drivers for the Atheros chipset, check here for the MADWiFi project). Only after purchasing did I find that the Broadcom chipset is only partially supported in Linux (guess I didn't research that extensively). See #The Bad News part later on for more info on that.
In Windows, everything pretty much worked. The only thing that threw me off a bit was my WAP's 'plus' configuration (D-Link DI-614+ WAP). It needs to be turned off in order for standard 'b' to work. After that was fixed, things just worked fine. The thing that impressed me the most was the range I got from this card. I did some signal strength comparisons between this card and my D-Link and on average found this card to get nearly twice the signal strength! Another issue I was having with the D-Link was resolved with this card as well - reliability. Perhaps because of the D-Link's refurb condition, it would often times completely lock up my system with conflicting IRQ problems. This new card has never given me an issue at all in the past month I've used it.
The Bad News
Now for the only disappointment I've had with the card - it's poorly supported in Linux (surprise) just as my D-Link was (maybe more so). I found two ways of running my card in Linux and both required the use of the Windows drivers and a wrapper program that utilized them. The first one I tried was the LinuxAnt project which is not free. There was a free trial, so I tried it and it worked very well for basic networking. It's based on a web interface where you plug in your license key, the destination of the Windows driver files and that's it. Everything else was handled automatically or very simply through the web interface. Not bad if it were free! But, being the cheap guy that I am, i wasn't satisfied with that and went searching for an alternative.
What I found is basically the same thing without the snazzy web interface. It's the ndiswrapper project hosted on SourceForge. Again, all that is required is to compile the project, tell the program which card to use (identified via hex codes gained from lspci - see their docs) and where to find the Windows driver files. This loads the kernel module for the card and brings it up, from there you need to become familiar with the iwconfig tools and ifconfig to configure the card for your network. I've created a script for starting/stopping the card that seems to work very well for me - you can find it here.
Because the NDIS style drivers are very much limited to Windows functionality, there really isn't much beyond basic networking you can do with this card in Linux. Programs such as Kismet, KWiFiManager and the Gnome WiFi Applet can't read the proper information from the card (or in the case of Kismet control the card directly) so they all fail to work properly. A very crude way of determining signal strength and other somewhat useful information is to use the 'iwlist scanning' command. Note, however that this too will not show any kind of "link quality" or "link noise level" information (items both the KWiFiManager and Gnome WiFi applet use to determine signal strength). In Windows, there is a program called NetStumbler which seems to do many of the things Kismet does. However, since the Broadcom chipset isn't really supported by NetStumbler either, it tends to crash when it starts finding lots of networks at once.
Conclusion
All in all I'm extremely happy with this new card. I'm disappointed in it's lack of a native Linux driver, but hopefully Broadcom will rectify that at some point. The folks at the ndiswrapper project are discussing now ways to make signal applets in both KDE (KWiFiManager) and Gnome (WiFi applet) work sufficiently well with this card. There are other projects as well that try to fullfill the needs of auto-configuration and management using standard tools in Linux that seem to hold some promise. Perhaps if I find something really useful for me I'll add a review of it here. In the mean time, I'm on the lookout for an 802.11g WAP now and I'm definately going to consider Buffalo at the top of my list!
| I've revised my opinion somewhat. While I do think the Buffalo card is a fine card, I have a new favorite. Look for my review os the Netgear WG511 soon! |
