Wireless Features

I put Buffalo's AOSS automated wireless networking setup feature through its paces in the WBR2-G54 review, so I'll just concentrate on new wireless features here. Figure 14 shows the main wireless settings screen, which has a few changes.

Figure 14: Wireless settings
(click image for larger view)

The screenshot shows the default settings, which include Mixed Wireless Mode (vs. alternates of 11b only and 11g only), Broadcom's 125* High Speed Mode (Afterburner) Frame Bursting Mode kicked in (alternates are normal Frame Bursting Mode and Disable) and 802.11g Protection (which ensures that 802.11b clients are heard) enabled.

A new control is the Auto-Channel Selection, which ensures that "the AirStation will continually search for the clearest channel and set itself accordingly", according to its on-line Help. I was disappointed to see that there are still no Transmit rate controls and that there isn't a control to keep WLAN and LAN traffic separate, as the Privacy Separator does for WLAN-to-WLAN client traffic.

Moving on to wireless security (Figure 15), Buffalo has added AES as a WPA-PSK option and added support to relay 802.1x authentication requests to an external RADIUS server. But WPA RADIUS ("Enterprise") mode is still not supported, nor is WPA-PSK in WDS connections.

Figure 15: Wireless security
(click image for larger view)

Finally, WDS-based bridging and repeating remains essentially unchanged, except for a note that "* WDS cannot be enabled while TKIP or AES is enabled" added right under the Wireless Bridging enable control. I also found that trying to enable WDS when the router was set to 125* High Speed Mode was answered with a screen telling me that was a no-no.