8. Wireless Security

Turning to the wireless security side of things (Figure 9), Buffalo has spiffed up the interface, but also removed two Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) features.

Figure 9: Wireless security

You might not notice at first due to the confusing labels (WPA is enabled via the "TKIP" radio button), but the WBR2 supports only WPA-PSK (Pre-Shared-Key). Both the WPA RADIUS ("Enterprise") mode and support for 802.1x authentication have been removed. Further, when WPA-PSK is enabled, only the mandatory TKIP mode is supported.

I can't really criticize Buffalo for this, since the inclusion of the stronger AES encryption mode in Broadcom-based products has more been a work-around for the chipset's poor throughput performance when using WPA / TKIP, than a differentiating feature.

It's also interesting to note that the Buffalo Tech WLI-CB-G54A CardBus card seems to think that AES is available if you use WinXP's Wireless Zero Configuration instead of Buffalo's Client Manager 2 to make your connection. But even if you choose AES in Zero Config's settings, the card falls back to TKIP so that it can connect.

If all this is too confusing, good ol' 64 and 128 bit WEP is available. MAC address association control (Wireless MAC Filtering) is also there to lock down your wireless LAN. I was happy to see that Buffalo has retained the handy "Preset" feature that automatically presents a list of currently associated clients for your ease in setting up your list of allowed wireless clients. Finally, you now can enable a Privacy Separator function, which prevents wireless clients from communicating with each other.