Well this is the first of a few more wireless reviews coming soon, over the past few weeks I've been testing out some Orinoco wireless kit and I can say man was I impressed! Anyway lets have a look at the access point:
The Orinoco AP-200 access point has lots of nice features such as, mac address filtering, port filtering,protocol filtering also support for up to 128bit WEP. Lets take a look at the units specifications:
Quite an impressive unit even though it appears to be one of the lower end access points that Orinoco produce. Included in the box with the unit is, power supply, ethernet cable, cd rom and a quick installation guide. Now lets get it out the box and have a look at it.
As you can see its quite an alright looking unit, with 4 leds on the front which indicate power, wireless activity and activity of the two wired LAN ports.
Yup this access point has 2 wired LAN ports meaning you can connect two LANs to it, funky! Once the LAN and power cable(s) have been plugged in there is a bit that clips onto the back of the unit hiding away to sockets for the plug and making things look nice and neat as you can see below.
The unit is designed for home and small office use and in my opinion it does this well, one thing I would fault the unit is perhaps the size of the unit which is larger than most popular access points I've seen, they however lack many of the features included with the AP-200. Setting up the unit was as easy as having a quick look at the included manual, changing an IP and fondling the web interface, you can however also admin the unit via the telnet and snmp interfaces. Lets have a look at the web interface:
As you can see I've changed the default password and username on the unit already, (cue Blue Peter here's one I made earlier stylee). I was able to admin the unit via the web interface from both the wireless connection and wired connection, I was also however able to admin the unit from another location on the internet by forwarding the appropriate port on my firewall/router box to the access point. Once logged in you are presented with the following screen:
Lots of useful information there, the units ip address,details of clients connected to the access point,etc.
Like I said setup was easy especially with the easy web wizards like the one below:
Setup wizard welcome screen.
Settings for the units ip address.
And finally wireless settings for the unit.
So thats the unit all setup, now lets try connecting to it :).
The wireless card in my Windows XP box picked up the access point ,connected to it and configured itself with an ip address without any problems ,what more could you ask for? I found the range with the access point very good with no noticable dropping of signal throughout wireless cards in my house.
All in all I would recommend this access point to anyone looking for a feature packed and reliable access point for their network.
Pros:
Good range and speed
Plenty of features
Cons:
A bit big
Clip on section at the back is quite fiddly
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