Product Reviews

Wireless networking is great for sharing an Internet connection, or even devices such as printers and scanners, without having cables trailing all over your house. But unless you have a newer notebook with wireless networking hardware built-in, you'll need to add a Wi-Fi card to your system, which requires a free PCI or PCMCIA slot. You may also want to add your games console to your wireless network so you can play games online. Unfortunately, there's no chance of a console having these kinds of slots. So what are you to do?

What you need is a network bridge. This is a wireless network device that plugs into your PC's Ethernet port, so no free slots are required. You can even use it with games consoles. As far as the connected PC or games console is concerned, it's connected to a wired network and the bridge takes care of the wireless side of things.

Although you wouldn't guess it from the name, this is just what the Belkin Wireless Ethernet Adapter

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is. It's a small grey box about the size of a CD case with an Ethernet port on its back and two short Wi-Fi antennae and three status LEDs on its front.

Whether you're using the adapter with a PC or games console, you'll need to configure it first by plugging it into a PC's network port. You can configure the device either using the setup Wizard supplied on CD or by going to the adapter's setup Web page. The Wizard is simplicity itself to use, although we had to try it a few times before it would detect the adapter. The setup Web page, which you access by typing the adapter's IP address into your Web browser, is a little less user friendly but still easy enough to use. In either case, you'll still need to know the details of your existing Wi-Fi network to connect the adapter to it.

With the initial configuration out of the way, you can unplug the adapter from your PC and connect it to the games console, or whatever device you want to connect to your wireless network. And that's it - the adapter just works.

We tested the adapter with a Belkin Wireless router and achieved a sustained average transfer speed of 19.5Mbit/s. This is far short of the 54Mbit/s claimed by all 802.11g Wi-Fi devices but it's in line with realistic performance expectations and still around five times faster than 802.11b can muster. It's also faster than the 15.7Mbit/s that the winner of our last wireless group test managed. This adapter is a niche product, but if you have no PCI slots free or need to network a games console it will do the job well.