The PinnacleLink 11/E1's throughput, at an average of 2.41 Mbps, was middle-tier compared with that of the other Karlnet-technology bridges, but its range was the best of this class of products. Its ability to retain data connections with the remote bridge was impressive. If you need to do point-to-multipoint bridging, the PinnacleLink may be a good choice.

Lucent, best known for its indoor wireless LAN products, has made its Orinoco (formerly WaveLAN) WavePoint II available for outdoor use. Looking remarkably similar to the company's standard indoor access point, the product uses Lucent's own 11-Mbps, IEEE 802.11b-compliant Orinoco PC Card (formerly called the WaveLAN Turbo 11 Mb PC Card) as a radio. Lucent provides both RJ-45 and BNC connections to your network, each rated at 10 Mbps. The base station lets you use two cards in the unit, affording wireless-to-wireless bridging options to extend the coverage of your wireless network.

The WavePoint II uses a version of the Karlnet software, and of all the implementations of this software, Lucent's is the most stable. The software was able to quickly find each of the bridges, letting us change the IP address automatically and go directly into the configuration. We weren't forced to change the IP address of the machine we were using in order to get the software to work, and setup in general was smooth. Lucent offers Wireless Equivalent Privacy 64- and 128-bit encryption, depending on which PC Card you purchase with the bridge. The software allows both packet-filtering by protocol and filtering of multicast and broadcast packets, and it also lets you set paths for IP routing. Signal-strength meters are included, as they are in all the products that use a version of the Karlnet software.

But that's the end of the good news. The bad news is that performance was lackluster. Lucent's product was at the bottom in nearly all our performance tests, with a final average throughput of only 2.3 Mbps-nowhere near the advertised data rate. We thought this showing might be attributable to the fact that the motherboard inside the base station operates at only 66 MHz, and Lucent representatives confirmed that the low speed may have been a cause of the poor performance results when we flooded the bridges with data. The LEDs on the product also are minimal, displaying only status, network activity, and whether a radio link is established.

Michael J. Utell and Asad Irshad are freelance technology writers based in Syracuse, N.Y. Utell can be reached at mjutell@syr.edu; Irshad can be reached at airshad@syr.edu.