Advanced Features... Proceed With Caution!

Intel doesn't call this baby "PRO" for nothin'.  Unless you are an old hand at configuring wireless Access Points, you should dig into the well-written and complete Reference Guide before futzing with any setting you don't know the meaning of.

Tip: You can either download a PDF copy of the Reference Guide from this page, or read it online at this page.  I found Chapter 1 very helpful in understanding how APs work, and especially how AP to AP communication is done!  Other helpful support info can be found on this page.

You can change just about any setting that an 802.11b AP can have via the admin interface, so there are dozens of ways that you can break your connection if you don't know what you're doing!

If you do know what you're doing, you'll be able to:

• Allow/disallow clients by MAC address

• Set the AP channel (frequency)

• Control AP access methods (Ethernet, Telnet, PPP via serial port, SNMP)

• Set Encryption keys

• Set packet filtering

• Establish AP to AP communication

• Allow/Disallow client-to-client communication via the AP

• Control roaming

If you've read any of my other Access Point reviews, you know I'm always complaining that consumer-grade APs don't provide any monitoring capabilities.  Not the case with the 2011AP!  Some of the more interesting things you can monitor are:

• Send/Receive packet counts by Interface, i.e. Ethernet, RF, etc.

• RF statistics

• AP statistics

• Other APs

Wireless Performance

I used netIQ's free QCheck utility to check the 2011AP's wireless performance.  Tests were done using an Intel PRO/Wireless 2011 PC card (reviewed here) as the wireless client, and a Windows PC connected to the AP as the other LAN client.  Here are the results:

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

Comment: The 2011AP's performance was very consistent over the tested conditions.  Signal quality according to the Intel client card utility was 50 (out of 100) at Condition 4.  I even moved the laptop to a normally dead zone and still got reasonable throughput.  Client antenna position also seemed to be not as sensitive as with other products.  The only negative was the 20% drop in throughput with WEP enabled.

Summary

Although not cheap, the 2011AP is worth considering if you're looking for a professional level 802.11b Access Point with good signal coverage and the ability to communicate wirelessly with other Access Points.

Postscript: As I was writing this review, news broke that Intel is abandoning the HomeRF camp and switching to 802.11b for all their wireless networking products.  So I guess you can expect consumer focused (and priced) WiFi products in the near future!