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Saturday, November 26, 2011

NETGEAR WG602 54Mbps Wireless Access Point Review

| Wireless Driver & Software

Status and Monitoring

The only client monitoring tool that you get is the Station List shown in Figure 5.

NETGEAR WG602- Station List screen

Figure 5: Station List screen
(click on the image for a full-sized view)

So at least you get to see if anything is connected to the AP, but the lack of traffic statistics means that you won’t be able to see if data is really flowing. The main Information screen also shows the (E)SSID, Channel number and WEP status.

Security Features

The WG602 supports standard 64 and 128 bit WEP key lengths in Hexadecimal format. You can also use the alphanumeric Passphrase function, which generates four identical Hexadecimal keys in 128 bit mode, but four different keys if you use 64 bit WEP. Keys are not stored in cleartext and don’t persist through a WEP disable/enable cycle. They also can’t be saved or read to/from a file. Also be sure to click the Shared Key button when enabling WEP or you may find that your wireless clients will be locked out of the AP.

Note that the AP doesn’t support the 802.1X authentication standard, disallow association from clients using an ESSID of “any”, or have the ability to suppress (E)SSID broadcast.

Finally, the 602′s Access Control feature lets you either block or allow wireless clients by entering their MAC addresses. The list can’t be saved or loaded to / from a file, though, and you aren’t given a pick-list of associated or in-range clients to ease the chore of creating your list. I also found the feature somewhat buggy, with a mysterious “Saving file…” message after entering about 4 or 5 addresses.

That’s it for the feature set. Time to see how it did in my Performance testing.

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