5. Wireless Details

Figure 9 shows the wireless feature set is very basic, letting you set just SSID, channel and whether you'd like the SSID to be broadcast. You do get, however, the ability to turn off the radio, again, something I'd like to see standard in wireless routers.

Figure 9: Wireless settings

You don't get the ability to control the transmit rate, set the base supported rate, control transmit power, or force the router mode, i.e. 11b or 11g. You also can't disable 802.11b protection and it doesn't look like GlobespanVirata's 11g throughput-enhancing Nitro technology is supported, or at least its control isn't exposed to the user.

The only wireless monitoring you get is the ability to see the MAC address and transmit rate of associated (connected) clients.

Security features include 64 or 128 bit WEP encryption and support for Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). Both WPA-PSK and WPA "Enterprise" modes are supported, with the ability to specify primary and secondary RADIUS servers in the latter mode. WEP keys can be entered in hex, ASCII, passphrase and "3Com Encryption String" forms and are stored in cleartext and maintained through a disable / enable cycle.

Tip: Current documentation says that WEP and WPA are simultaneously supported. However, current firmware has removed this feature and either WEP or WPA must be chosen.

MAC address-based Association (Connection) control is also available, but when enabled, offers only an Allow (vs. an Allow / Block) option. 3Com does provide a handy pick-list of currently associated clients that eases the task of building the list, but import / export of the list isn't supported.