Linksys WAP54G Instant Wireless-G Access Point reviewed

| Wireless Driver & Software

Basic Features and a look inside

The 54G comes in Linksys’ signature purple and grey plastic box. All indicator lights are on the front of the box and are bright and viewable from a wide angle. The indicators include: Power, Diag, Link/Activity, Full/Collision and 100Mbps for the 10/100 Ethernet LAN connection, and separate Activity and Link lights for the wireless LAN connection. The wireless Activity LED blinks constantly at a rapid rate, and the Link LED shines steadily whether or not wireless clients are nearby. When wireless data is flowing, however, the Activity LED brightens for the duration of the transfer.

The Ethernet 10/100 port and power jack are on the rear panel, along with a factory-defaults reset switch. Linksys includes a wall-mounting plate that does double-duty as an adapter to allow Linksys’ smaller boxes (such as their 5 port switch) to be stacked with their “normal” sized boxes. Also included are a CD with the PDF User Guide and Windows-based Setup Wizard, along with a normal UTP Ethernet cable.

Manufacturers are getting a little smarter with their FCC product registrations, submitting only the wireless radio portion of their products. Such is the case with the WAP54G since looking up its FCCID yielded information on the Broadcom BCM94306MP mini-PCI radio only – same as used in the BuffaloTech WBR-G54 that I recently tested.

So that you don’t go away completely disappointed with the lack of any internal photos, I’ve included one of the shots from the FCC exhibits in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Broadcom BCM94306MP mini-PCI ’54g’ radio

The radio card plugs into a connector on the main board, which has a design similar to Linksys’ dual-band WAP51AB (reviewed here). A Broadcom BCM4702 Wireless Network Processor handles the processing chores, supported by just RAM, Flash memory, and an Altima AC101 10/100 Ethernet chip for the LAN connection. I noted with interest, however, the empty set of pads for what looked like another miniPCI connector – most likely for a future dual-band a/g design. Further exploration revealed that the Ethernet connector is wired for Power Over Ethernet operation, although Linksys is not specing the feature at this time.

Although I was first fooled by the plastic “boots” that hid them, it turns out that the two moveable, jointed dipole antennas are attached via the same RP-TNC style connectors that Linksys uses in its popular WAP11 AP.

That about wraps up the internal exam. Let’s go set it up…