This category has been pretty stagnent for a year now. The 802.11n standard is not yet out and it won’t get ratified until March 2007. So we are right now at 802.11g with some improvements that are mainly about tweaking TCP/IP and other parameters. There are some nonstandard protocols as well, but these require special PC Cards in laptops. For instance, we have a D-Link DI-624 that needs a special card to bond channels. “PC Magazine”:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1823176,00.asp did a review last year and interestingly, they thought Linksys was the winner across all three categories although the differences were truly “minor”:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1823176,00.asp
* Vanilla 802.11g. Linksys WRT54G has been the model name they’ve used for ever.
* 802.11g with some tweaks. As usual, the model is very obscure, you have to look for that ending S, so you want the WRT54GS and PC Magazine. The piece claims that performance improves even with standard 802.11g in notebooks. I’m guessing, this is the high volume and has the best prices, others, I’d just get the vanilla WRT54G.
* 802.11 pre-n. These use MIMO for better performance, buy they are completely non standard, so until this stuff goes into vanilla
