The 102 supports 40 bit WEP encryption, and you can only set the four keys as 10 Hexadecimal characters each, since the "pass phrase" key method is not supported.

Tip: You need to set the Authentication Type to either "Open System" or "Both" and the Default Key to "None" to disable encryption.  Enable encryption by setting Authentication Type to "Shared Key" and the Default Key to your desired key.  If you need other help with encryption, see this page.

Unlike other consumer-grade APs, you won't get a performance hit by enabling WEP, as you'll see in the Performance section below.

Monitoring, Access Control, & Other features

The 102's SNMP program provides simple Ethernet and Wireless network statistics, but you can't save them and you can clear them only by power cycling the unit.

No other monitoring capabilities are provided in either the SNMP or USB admin programs, so you can't see:

• how many clients are using the network

• the MAC or IP address of clients

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

The 102's LED indicators aren't much help in telling you what's going on since the Wireless indicator on the front panel just glows steadily no matter what's happening on the wireless network.  The Ethernet Link/Activity LED does properly indicate what's going on, but it's on the rear panel of the 102, so you can't easily see it.

You also can't control access to the wireless network by blocking/allowing MAC addresses, and can't do any packet filtering to control the services that users can access.

On a positive note, the 102 supports client roaming, so you can use it in larger, multiple AP networks.

Performance

I used netIQ's free QCheck utility to check the 102's wireless performance.  Tests were done using an NETGEAR MA401 PC card (reviewed here) as the wireless client, and an Ethernet-connected Windows PC as the other LAN client.  Here are the results:

Summary

Although somewhat late to the 802.11b market, NETGEAR looks like they've chosen a decent set of products to do battle with.  The ME102 sets up relatively easily and seems to be a robust performer.  Although it's priced along with most of the competitive pack, its ability to maintain its throughput with WEP enabled gives it a little bit of an edge.  Add 128 bit WEP and more aggressive pricing, and NETGEAR could make up for lost time in the fast moving 802.11b market!