RangeBooster Rocks!

Last week I wrote a bit about the Linksys WRV200 wireless home router. It eventually saved my day struggling with the Nabaztag, and definitely deserves more coverage. Basically I had two issues using my old WRT54GC router. The coverage was not enough - even though I was using an external antenna, I had to install a second WAP54G access point. The good thing was the WAP54G could have been configured as a "wireless repeater", so no extra cabling (only power supply) was necessary. The second issue was the need to have a VPN access to my home network from outside. VPN is a secure "tunnel" you can set up over the Internet, so even being physically "outside" the firewalled network, you can work over this "tunnel" as you were inside (for example print on the home printer or watch a home camera or schedule a TV recording using the web interface to the home TV receiver). After short evaluation (and being a happy Linksys customer) I decided to go for the WRV200. I wanted to test how the RangeBooster technology worked and set up a VPN tunnel. There were other potential bonuses as well - some QoS features (bandwidth allocation for IP telephony), and VLANs (virtual network segments) - I thought might have been useful.

The RangeBooster feature really rocks. The WiFi signal is very good everywhere around my house and I was able to get rid of all the repeaters previously installed. There are several "booster" technologies on the market, most of them use some form of MIMO technology. MIMO (Multiple Inputs Multiple Outputs) concept works by transmitting multiple signals over the same frequency, using spatially - separated multiple antennas. To old school radio engineers this probably sounds like some kind of witchcraft, but thanks to some very sophisticated signal processing algorithms at the receiving end, the potentially interfering signals are recombined in the right order. Linksys makes a lot of buzz on their SpeedBooster feature available in several products. The main difference here is the SpeedBooster transmits different bits over its MIMO channels (and recombining them gains throughput, but requires compatible SpeedBooster hardware on the other end), while the RangeBooster transmits the same bits over MIMO (thus either the left or the right signal gets through), and recombines received multipath (reflected) signals while receiving. This way the RangeBooster gives superior range and coverage without special hardware at the other end (ie. you can benefit from this while using your ordinary WiFi card, like the ones built in the most popular notebooks).

MIMO is a great concept and it has recently been finalized as a 802.11n standard. 802.11n will give you both speed and range boost, so look for a "n" standard based WiFi when shopping for your next computer. But in the meantime the RangeBooster may be just the solution you need, as most WiFi devices are not "n" enabled and really do not require 100Mbps or more, they just need a reliable connection.

There was a company named Airgo, who pioneered MIMO technology, including the 802.11n standard. I said "was", as beginning of December, 2007 Airgo was acquired by Qualcomm, bringing the last dimension of signal multiplication to time- and code- division multiple access mastered to perfection by the San Diego team. Again all radio transmission technology roads lead to the "mighty Q"...