Wireless Setup

The 316's wireless capabilities come via an ZyAIR100 802.11b radio card inserted into a PCMCIA slot in the rear of the router.  The card is based on the Intersil PRISM II chipset and its FCC ID shows that it's made by Z-COM.  There's no installation process for the card, other than inserting it into the 316 before you power it up.  

Note that the card has a removable plug that covers a miniature connector.  Unfortunately, it's an SCX type, not the MMCX type that's used by the ORiNOCO and Buffalo Tech cards, so you won't be able to use their booster antennas with the 316. ZyXEL says that they're planning to offer booster antenna solutions and adapters later.

The 316's wireless setup gives you a few more "knobs" to tweak than other Access Points in this price range, and you can get to everything from the Web Configurator interface, which is nice.  You can set the Channel number, and Wireless LAN Service Area (ESSID), as other products allow.  But the 316 also gives you access to RTS Threshold and Fragmentation Boundary Threshold settings...which you should leave alone unless you know what you're doing. 

Encryption and Monitoring

The Web Configurator also lets you do the 40bit WEP encryption setup, complete with positions for four WEP keys, which can be entered as either 5 alpha-numeric characters or as 10 hexadecimal characters.  The 316 has a third "Optional WEP" setting, which the 316's wireless App note describes as follows:

For saving CPU power and getting more rapid response, P316 sends out traffic without encryption when WEP= Optional WEP40. However, wireless clients still need any one of the four keys in Menu 3.5 of P316 to decrypt the received traffic.

Not sure why you'd want to use that setting, but it's there anyway!  By the way, the user manual warns that enabling WEP will give you a "significant performance degradation" when you're running at 5.5 or 11Mbps speeds, and they're right!  See the Wireless Performance section below for the details.

No matter what I entered, I kept getting an error message when I tried to save the WEP string settings via the Web Configurator.  I was able to enter WEP keys via the SMT interface, however, so this appears to be a Web Configurator bug.

The 316 allows you to see raw data traffic statistics for wireless, WAN, and Ethernet LAN network segments via the Web Configurator Statistics screen (shown below).

However, you can't see:

• How many wireless clients are using the network

• the MAC or IP address of clients

• the state (active, roaming, etc.) of clients

You also can't control which wireless clients can access your 316, but you can use Filters to block Internet access to the fixed set of services for both Ethernet and wireless clients.

Wireless Performance

I ran the usual QCheck test suite on the 316, using a ZyAIR100 PC card as the wireless client, and a Windows PC as the other LAN client.  

Both clients are on the LAN side of the router, so these tests do not include the router's performance.

Here are the results:

(Tests run with:
 - WEP encryption DISABLED
- Tx Rate: Automatic
- Power Save disabled)
[Ver 3.21 (CB1) firmware]

(Details of how we tested can be found here.) 

Comment: The combination of P316 and ZyAIR100 PC client card breezed through my testing with surprisingly consistent performance. But the 50% throughput drop when WEP is enabled, could dampen your spirits if you plan on using that feature on a regular basis.  Unlike some other products, the 316 had no problems connecting with an ORiNOCO Gold card, with or without WEP enabled.

Router Performance

I also used Qcheck to test the 316's routing performance:

[Tests run with Ver 1.1 firmware]

(Details of how we tested can be found here.) 

Comment: The 316's routing performance will satisfy most all Broadband users' needs, with good performance in either direction.

Summary

ZyXEL's P316 is a solid performer, but its success may be held back by three issues:

First, at an on-line price of over $400, it's expensive compared to its competition.

Second, the high price doesn't include features that less expensive competing products have, such as: support for dialup WAN connections; printserving; and built-in multi-port 10/100 switches.  

Finally, ZyXEL's retail distribution is limited, since they choose to not distribute through major retail channels.  You can always buy direct from ZyXEL (in the US), but you won't see the 316 on your favorite networking products retailer's shelf.