Buffalo WHR-HP-G54

The Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 is a very low cost WiFi router that has a surprising amount of flexibility built into its tiny size.

Price from: £40
WAN: 1 10/100
LAN: 4 10/100, NAT
VPN: pass through only
Firewall: SPI, IDS and DMZ
WiFi: 802.11b/g MIMO WEP/WPA
Additional ports: none
Power Supply: External Power
Consumption: 5W typical

The Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 is a fairly standard b/g mode WiFi router but with a MIMO (Multiple Input Output) facility to increase throughput and range. MIMO traditionally uses multiple antennae to increase the range but the WHR-HP-G54 has only a single orientable stick aerial. Buffalo claims that the increased range and performance are due to the use of an amplifier which increases range by a factor of three and speed by a factor of six; however, these gains are only promised if you also upgrade the client adaptors to use Buffalo MIMO clients. Given that it isn’t legal to increase the transmitted power of a standard b/g WiFi access point the improvements claimed are almost certainly due to better receivers, which makes the actual gains in speed and range highly variable and dependent on environmental factors such as transmission path and radio noise. As we've discussed before on Server Management, research shows environmental factors can have a big effect on WiFi performance.

The key feature of the WHR-HP-G54 is that it is a cable/WAN router. You can add a modem if you have to and the built-in software supports logging on using PPPoE. A wizard will autodetect the type of the WAN connection and prompt you for user name and password. You can configure the same parameters manually. Of course if the WAN connection is a simple cable interface then a fixed or DCHP allocated IP address can be used. The WAN port will auto-detect the speed and direction.

Configuring the LAN side of the router is easy as there are few options presented unless you click the "Advanced" button. It will act as a DCHP server and you can configure the gateway, DNS, WINS and domain name that are supplied to clients as well as the lease time. A list of assigned IP addresses is presented. You can also assign static routes, a DMZ machine, some aspects of the NAT translation and IPsec pass through. Other than pass through it doesn't support VPNs.

Configuring the router