The U.S. Robotics 22Mbps Wireless Access PC Card and the U.S. Robotics 22Mbps Wireless Access Point are more expensive than the D-Link products, but the file-transfer performance and operational range are about the same. Two appealing features of the U.S. Robotics products include automatic network type detection (ad hoc or infrastructure) and a Windows Desktop access-point configuration utility, so you don't have to enter the AP's IP address in a browser to configure the access point.

On our file-transfer test, the U.S. Robotics equipment took 2:49 in 11-Mbps mode and 2:17 in 22-Mbps mode (a bit slower than D-Link system). We tested interoperability between the U.S. Robotics and D-Link adapters and access points and a variety of conventional 802.11b components and found no problems at all.

If you don't need to move up to the higher performance and cost of 802.11a, these D-Link and U.S. Robotics wireless networking components (based on the Texas Instruments ACX100 chip set) provide a welcome increase in 802.11b speed and range without a big bump in cost.