I need an access point for my office (there will be at most 5 users at any time). What can you tell me about 803.11g (actual speed, interoperability with 803.11b cards, security, brands...)?

Thanks

Presumably, you meant 802.11g?

I've got a Linksys WRT54G. It works fine with the 802.11b WiFi adapter in my laptop. It also works fine with Hugo's Linksys WET11 -- which I've borrowed in order to connect my PCs (upstairs) with the router (downstairs).

Note that the WRT54G doesn't actually implement 802.11g, because it was still a draft standard at the time. It implements what Linksys are calling Wireless-G; presumably they'll release a firmware upgrade soon for full 802.11g compliance (if needed).

I can't comment for speed/number of users, because it's only got my cable modem on one end, so I can only use 1Mbps anyway. Also, I'm not using it with any other -g equipment.

But I can confirm that it interoperates with 802.11b stuff fine, it seems.

I would, however, caution you that Linksys support is a shambles.

I had an 802.11g network set up. It is too early to adopt this technology in my opinion. 802.11b interoperability sucks. You lose a lot of speed and distance with B cards on a G network. Speed with G was good though. The acces spoints (Belkin brand) would always crash like 802.11b would in the early days. I was constantly checking for firmware updates too.

For an office, I think you would want stability and 802.11b is the way to go for that. Here's a good deal for an 802.11b router and PC Card.

Oh, and security is still 128-bit WEP in most vendors products, so it's just as crappy as 802.11b.

I've just bought a Buffalo WBR-G54 and a couple Buffalo WLI-CB-G54 CardBus cards. I've got it in 802.11g mode only though as I'm migrating everything over to 802.11g from 802.11b.

The speed seems fine to me. I can get about 20mbps throughput but that's with no 802.11b equipment. If I turn back on 802.11b support in the AP and have it start to transmit then the entire network drops to around 6mbps.

Security is in theory pretty good. When you upgrade to the latest firmware for the AP it gives you WPA support. I've enabled WPA-PSK (PreShared Key) and AES encryption. It's much more secure than WEP and RC4 but isn't backwards compatible with older equipment. You'll need upgrade the firmware on older equipment to support WPA. Most older equipment also doesn't support AES so you'll have to do a hardware upgrade for that. You can use TKIP which is hardware compatible with old hardware though.

Range is about the same as 802.11b but the speed is improved at lower signal strengths.