As I mentioned in a previous post for my birthday Heather got me an Xbox 360 and one of the neat features of the Xbox 360 is that it can connect to the internet. This allows you to download game content, games, demo, movies and patches. Also by connecting the Xbox 360 to your network you are stream video and music from the other computers attached to you network.
The one trick with the Xbox is that unlike the Nintendo Wii that has a built in wireless network adapter the Xbox only comes with a standard wired NIC. You can purchase a separate wireless adapter for it but at almost $200.00, I thought that was a little expensive. So not wanting to purchase the wireless adapter I decided I would just drill a hole in the floor and run a CAT 6 network cable to the switch on my desk in the basement. This mistake I made was mentioning this to Heather, she was less then excited about me drilling a hole in the floor. Personally I always prefer to run the copper if I am able to, I also end up having issues when I attempt to go wireless.
So now not wanting to purchase the Xbox 360 Wireless Networking Adapter and having being threatened if I drilled a hole in the floor I turned to option C, a wireless network bridge. Basically a network bridge allows you to connect two types of networks that normally are incompatible to each other, they act as bridge between the networks, hence there name. So in this case I wanted to take my Xbox 360 that had a wired NIC and connect it to my wireless network.
The only wireless bridge that I was able to find that was reasonability priced was the Linksys WET54G wireless bridge. So I ordered one in and all in I have been extremely happy with it. The WET54G was pretty easy to setup after I read the manual and found out how to directly connect to it, skipping over the easy setup wizard that did not work.
To configure the Linksys WET54G you first connect to it using a standard computer using its network port. It ships with a CD that contacts a small Java application that is supposed to make configuration of the unit painless. The trick is if you are using encryption on your network it will not work. The reason why it will not work is that in the application you select the type of encryption that you are using and then it generates the pass phrase or encryption key. Which is fine except it does not know which keys are needed for it to connect to your existing network and you are not changing the keys that it generates in the application. So basically if you are just using the quick start program and you have an encrypted wireless network, which you should, you will not get this bridge to work.
So after some swearing I read the manual and found out how to connect to the device directly. I was then able to enter in the keys that where needed for it to connect to my secure wireless network. So after you have it connected to your network all I had to do was plug in my Xbox to the Linksys WET54g and it was received an IP and was able to connect to the internet. I found I am getting really good speeds well over my 7 megabyte internet connection.
With the exception of the broken quick start application I am extremely happy with the Linksys WETG54g. It is easy to use and was about half the price of the Microsoft Wireless adapter. The WET54g is also much more useful then the Microsoft Adapter since I could redeploy it if need be in the future.
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