Buffalo AirStation Local Router - Standard

The AirStation turned in a very respectible performance. Let's just cut to the chase and look at the numbers...

Test Description	Transfer Rate (Mbps)		Ping (msec)
Test Description	File Xfr	Qcheck	Ping (msec)
AP to Client - Condition 1	3.2	3.5	< 10
AP to Client - Condition 2	3.0	3.1	< 10
AP to Client - Condition 3	2.9	3.5	< 10
AP to Client - Condition 4	2.9	2.9	< 10

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

The key difference between the AirStation and AirConnect performance is on the longer range test (Condition 4). I suspect this is due to the AirStation card staying locked on the 11Mbit rate, while the AirConnect card dropped to a 2Mbit rate and appeared to keep trying to change rates. Note that I did not force the card or Access Point bit rates, but let them both auto-adjust their rates.

The "Qcheck" column under "Transfer Rate" uses netIQ's (formerly Ganymede) free QCheck utility. The column lists the results of a Qcheck TCP Throughput test, using a 1000kByte test data size. I'm not sure why it tends to show higher throughput numbers than my simple file transfer test does. Maybe it's due to the smaller amount of data it uses in its test. At any rate, I'll be adding the Qcheck results to future reviews because the program is easily available and easy to use.

The AirStation is the shot-over-the-bow of the other companies who are fielding 802.11b / WiFi wireless products. Although Buffalo is not being aggressive on LAN card pricing (it goes for the $150 street price that is becoming common for these cards) the Access Point pricing is one half to one third the price of competing units, and even slightly lower than Apple's Airport Base Station. The main things you give up for the lower price are the wider assortment of Admin interfaces (i.e. PPP, SNMP, Telnet, etc.) that the "professional" products have and maybe some "site survey" utilities, depending on the product.

As far as I'm concerned the AirStation is going to do to the 802.11b Access Point market what the Linksys did to the router market. Let the price wars begin! We're definitely looking forward to evaluating the AirStations with built-in routing capability, so stay tuned!