Gigabyte AirCruiser GN-BC01 802.11g Wireless Desktop Router
Review
While broadband Internet has become standard
the world over, different countries and regions approach things differently when it
comes to how the networking hardware is implemented. For instance, in
Canada, just about every network appliance from home routers to DSL and cable
modems takes the form of an external box which is connected to
your computer(s) via CAT5 Ethernet cabling.
In Europe, things are considerably different. The trend there is more
towards internal solutions which use a desktop PC as the host for these
networking devices. Your DSL modem or home router would come in the form
of a PCI device, and all connections would route into the back of your
system.
Today we're going to bring a bit of European flavour to
PCstats with a review of Gigabyte's AirCruiser GN-BC01 802.11g internal
wireless PCI router. This device incorporates a
fully wireless home router/Internet sharing device onto a
PCI card which you install directly into your desktop PC. It also
comes with a nifty, blue-LED tipped magnetic external antenna which
is fairly high gain at 3dB.
The internal form
factor of the Wifi Router AirCruiser GN-BC01 is new to us though, so
we're interested to see how it performs and what kind of range it gets compared
to conventional external wireless networking routers.
The Gigabyte AirCruiser GN-BC01 is an 802.11g wireless router, supporting 54mbps of wireless bandwidth via its external
antenna, which has blinking blue LED at
the tip. Differing from most 'boxed' external wireless routers, the AirCruiser
GN-BC01 does not have any additional wired networking ports. It has
a single 10/100 Ethernet port which is intended to connect to the
network adaptor in the computer that the router is installed in. Of course,
you could connect this single port to an Ethernet hub or switch and support
multiple wired clients that way.
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