4. ASUS

ASUS used N+I as the official U.S. launch of its networking product line and had a few interesting surprises for the sharp-eyed visitor. I saw the expected WL330g, which is the 802.11g version of ASUS' amazingly small WL330 11b Pocket AP. Like its 11b sibling, the WL330g uses a Marvell Libertas chipset and should be available shortly for about $90.

What I didn't expect to see was the new little wonder that Senior Director of Wireless R&D Tenlong Deng casually pulled out of his pocket. The WL530g is a full-featured four-port 11g router that's about as small as you can make a device with one WAN and four LAN 10/100 ports (Figure 1).

Figure 1 - The world's smallest 802.11g router - ASUS WL-530g

As I admired its matte black case with silver accent band, Deng casually mentioned the 530g's auto-switchover router / AP function. Since many consumers don't realize that they can use a wireless router as an AP [see this FAQ for the how-to], the 530g will do it for you. If connections are made to both its WAN and LAN ports, it will function as a wireless router. But if you connect only to its LAN ports, it will shut off its DHCP server to let you use it as an AP (or even just as a four port 10/100 switch). By the way, it has an upgradeable antenna, but no PoE and no WDS bridging. It should be out by the end of June and sell for about $70.

I learned that the WL-HDD wireless (11g) hard drive has hit a bit of a snag that will delay it a few more months. Everything was ready to go when the ASUS engineers found a thermal problem due to the heat generated by the hard drive. ASUS is taking advantage of the delay to add an USB1.1 port to make it easy to transfer files to the drive from non-wireless devices. Drive capacity and pricing still haven't been set.

ASUS also showed a wide line of switches including unmanaged, "smart" (VLAN, port control and QoS tagging) and fully-managed layer 2 and 3 switches in various combinations of 10/100 and 10/100/1000 port configurations. Its "smart" and managed models include quick-change fan modules, rack-mounting kits and dual-power capability. The mounting kit includes a simple, but robust post-and-hole feature that keeps switches from plummeting to the bottom of a rack if the mounting screws vibrate loose. On the low end of things, ASUS is trying to escape the fast-approaching commoditization of consumer gigabit Ethernet switches via its GX1104V. It's a 4 port GbE switch that includes a USB 1.1 print server.

The last discovery I made in ASUS' booth was its IPX3141 router - the first I've seen to include an integrated four-port 10/100/1000 switch. ASUS told me the fanless router should be available in late Q3 and pricing hasn't been set yet. I've been wondering who was going to be the first to take this inevitable step in SOHO networking and now I (and you) know.