Who makes the best wireless equipment?

[Tropical]

I was just wondering who makes the best wireless equipment? I was thinking netgear but dlink is also good right?

[primesuspect]

Are you talking enterprise level or home level?

[Cyclonite]

I'm betting he's talking home level, because if you tell him the cost of enterprise level, he's liable to explode... :p

By the way, I like NetGear's networking products. That's not saying they're the best though.

[primesuspect]

I DON'T recommend Linksys wireless products. The WAP11 that I have is a total piece of crap and I hate it every day. When I look at it, my teeth clench and I get angry and I want to throw it against the wall.

Or not.

But still, linksys wap - bad experience.

[Cyclonite]

Good to know. I always heard Linksys was good, but never had good experiences with a Linksys product.

[primesuspect]

Their wired stuff is good, and their soho/home routers are nice, but I've just had crap experiences with their wireless stuff.

[qparadox]

Wireless Linksys is crap, home stuff is always hit and miss. Generally netgear is good but I had to deal with a pretty awful backend interface on a netgear router once. Definitely not an experience I want to repeat.

So try and find somewhere that'll take back opened products if possible in case you "miss." This is especially true if you're getting a 802.11g capable router.

[Geeky1]

I've never had a problem with Linksys, DLink, or Netgear stuff... Cisco is good as well, altho that may be a bit on the expensive side...

Stay away from:
3Com (excellent stuff, but it's a b*tch to get it working under anything but xp, and I doubt their wireless stuff is much better)
Hawking (stupid mof*s won't return my e-mails)
Anything generic
All Siemens products

[TekGamer]

how about a nice corp. AP at the low low price of 2800.00 (intermec brand)

hehehe. For home cisco probably makes the best ive seen and worked with. I used a linksys wireless pcmcia in my laptop for work in a cisco wireless network and it worked perfectly..

Tek

[jono]

I just purchased some Netgear wireless equipment, namely the DG824M, dead easy to set up seems reliable, just having a bit of a problem sharing files, but apart from that its very good.

[Tropical]

Is it better to have everything made by the same company or it doesn't really matter?

[Clutch]

Tropical said
Is it better to have everything made by the same company or it doesn't really matter?

For me I like to have everything made by the same company, that way you know it will most likely play nice together, and it just looks better imho, but that's just me. But i'm sure you can mix and match just fine.

[Xanthos]

For SoHo, I've had really good luck with netgear. I've had a MR314 up and stable for over a year and a half. Likewise I just setup a MR814 weekend and took me all of 5 minutes and worked like a charm out of the box, plus they've added a lot of good documentation to their web interface.

On the Enterprise side, I'm partial to Proxim's Orinoco (formally Lucent). I did a deployment two years ago and the gear still work great. However, our network guys are moving us to Cisco for a new enterprise deployment.

Like everyone else says, stay away from Linksys wireless gear like the plague. They seem to fail, die, or not talk to anything quite frequently.

Also, it's better to buy all your gear from one manufacutor.

Not that you were thinking about it, but stay far far away from Microsoft's own Wireless gear. To say it sucks....is understating it big time. Not only do you force you to install their fluffy client, it overrides the built-in wireless setting in XP so you have to use their client.

[WuGgaRoO]

my wireless D-Link router is excellent...both me and my friend have it...and we dont have any complaints

[Thrax]

I use linksys. The WRT54G is, like its BEFSR41 wired brother, an excellent product.

Signal strength is good even through an 1890 house with a LOT of solid wood, and a LOT of stone.

I've used D-Link and Belkin's products, and I'm thoroughly unenthused by their offerings. The D-Link has a crappy UI and fewer features than most to GO with that UI.

The Belkin has such a low signal strength, that I practically have to mount it on the ceiling and be in the same room.

[Superducky55]

WHOA! glad i stumbled upon this thread..
i have 450 bucks of Linksys wireless 54g stuff in my shopping cart at newegg. :eek: Looks like i'll be going with netgear.. i have a netgear hub and router right now; both work great i just wonna move to wireless.

:D nice thread