5. The Technologies - Atheros VLocity

Table 1 summarizes information on the chip technologies used in the products tested, which was gathered using a combination of internal product photos from the FCC ID documents and driver information reported by WinXP. A glance at the table shows that while Airgo may lead in terms of MIMO technology (my opinion), Atheros appears to be selling more chipsets for MIMO products, or at least they're in more manufacturers' products.

To ease comparison, I've grouped pictures of similarly-designed products together. The most similar are the TRENDnet and ZyXEL designs, which have virtually identical FCC ID filings. The test reports even have the same exact data, with only the product names changed. The report for the TRENDnet products lists TRENDware as the applicant, but the reports for the ZyXEL products list U-Media Communications as the applicant, which makes sense since the FCC ID number prefix is U-Media's. At any rate, the cards are the same and are shown in Figure 1 and use Atheros' 5005VL VLocity chipset.

Figure 1: TRENDnet and ZyXEL card
(Click image to enlarge)

From Figure 2, it appears that D-Link's DWL-G650M card also uses Atheros' VLocity chipset, but with a slightly different board design.

Figure 2: D-Link 2XR card
(Click image to enlarge)

Things are the same for the routers for these three products. Figure 3 shows the identical mini-PCI radios used in the TRENDNet and ZyXEL routers and Figure 4 the slightly different mini-PCI used in the D-Link DI-634M.

Figure 3: ZyXEL and TRENDnet router mini-PCI radio
(Click image to enlarge)

Figure 4: D-Link DI-634M mini-PCI radio
(Click image to enlarge)