SmallNetBuilder

Features

The WGA600N's footprint is slightly smaller than a CD case. Since it's designed to sit flat on your desk, the antennas are not positioned as high as the WET6's. Figure 3 shows the front and rear panel lights, controls and connections, which include a button to initiate a Wi-Fi Protected Setup pushbutton session and a 10/100 Ethernet port on the back. There are also wall-mount screw slots on the bottom of the case.

Figure 3: WGA600N Front and Rear panels

The slideshow provides a walkthrough of most of the WGA6's important screens, so I won't repeat all that information here. Figure 4 shows part of the Basic Wireless page, which does not include a site survey / connect feature.

Figure 4: Basic Wireless settings

If you use the web interface to select and connect to a network, you'll need to first visit the Wireless Status page to see a list of in-range networks, then the Basic Wireless page where you would manually enter the SSID of the network that you want, then finally the Device Info page to confirm that you are actually connected.

Note that, unlike the WET6, the WGA6's Device Info page does not display the link rate of the connection, which is helpful when debugging problem connections and confirming whether a device is using 20 or 40 MHz bandwidth mode. On the other hand, the WGA6 does show whether in-range networks support draft 11n (on the Wireless Status page), while the WET6 doesn't.

Cisco obviously prefers that users have a WPS-enabled router and just push its WPS button and the button on the front of the WGA6 to connect, or load up and run the install wizard.

As is my practice, I never loaded the install CD or used its "wizard". Instead, since I had Cisco send me a WPS-enabled WRT400N along with the WGA6, I tried a push-button WPS connection. I'm happy to report that it connected up on the first try, using a 5 GHz band connection secured via WPA2/AES. When I pressed the buttons again, I got the same result. So if you want to direct the WGA6 to connect to a specific band, you'll need to use the 802.11 Band radio buttons shown in Figure 4 to select the band.