Works Great - Easy to set up

You may be confused by the contrasting nature of reviews here. I don't blame you.

In my opinion, if you are not familiar with words and acronyms including "Ethernet", "WEP" or "Static IP Address" you will most certainly be confused by the DWL-G710.

Yes, there's a secret code at work here. Wireless is still new and is definitely not completely "Plug and Play". The instruction guide assumes you know where in your computer to go to do things – like establish network connections!

Firstly, let me tell you that the repeater works fabulously in my house. The hardware does exactly what is supposed to do and I find signal strength good everywhere now. My main router and WAP (wireless access point) are at one end of the house and the signal strength at the other extreme of my 2-story house was weak indeed! Not any more!

So How do you Set it Up?

To cut to the chase, let me tell you what has to be done. And by the way, I used a laptop computer with WiFi to do the set up. It took me 5 minutes. If you don’t understand me, then the only thing that means is that you’ve probably never done this before – it is not a reflection of the repeater. I suggest that any good computer store with people who’ve done this can help you.

First I turned the WiFi off on my laptop. On mine, I have an icon in the systray (WinXp Professional and an AirLink cardbus). Next, using WinXp’s Start/Control Panel/Network Connections, I enabled a new network connection and configured a static IP address of 192.168.0.33. That’s because the repeater is factory set to work on 192.168.0.30. Obviously you cannot have both laptop and repeater with the same address.

Next I plugged one end of the included Cat5 cable into the Ethernet port in my laptop and the other into the repeater.

Next I opened Internet Explorer (IE) and entered the 192.168.0.30 address into the address location. This is like entering something like www.microsoft.com only using the pure IP address. The sign-in box came up on my screen and as the instructions indicated I entered “Admin” without the quotes. That got me into the configuration screen system.

Since my WAP is up and running, the repeater knew it was there. You click a “Site Survey” button to display all available wireless networks nearby. It turns out that in my neighborhood there’s only 3 of us. All that was left for me to do was to select the one I wanted (mine) enter the SSID (I have my WAP’ broadcasting of the SSID disabled), change the channel to be same as my WAP, and set up the WEP. (You simply enter the same number sequence as you have in your WAP).

Next you click the accept button, the repeater reboots and you’re in business. I unplugged the Cat5, disabled this network connection, and restarted my wireless card in the laptop using the same systray icon.

WOW I was surprised! My signal strength went from 18% to almost 100%! Amazing!
The whole process literally took me 5 minutes. Well, er, almost. Turns out I entered the WEP numbers incorrectly! If you do that, you get plenty of signal, but also get a message on your computer saying that you have “limited access”.

Sorry I can’t tell you all a standard way of doing this because there are so many versions of Windows and what-not out there. Suffice it to say that the repeater instructions will be the same and they are correct. The instructions are on a CD that comes with the repeater. There are no drivers or anything like that – you aren’t “installing” anything on your computer. You are essentially using your computer to configure the repeater to match your existing WAP.

Give this unit a try. I found one on Ebay for $20!