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SMC 2632W Wireless PCMCIA Card

Networking on the Move

I have previously looked at two wireless products from SMC, both of which were fine products and I had high hopes for their SMC2632W wireless LAN card. Unfortunately, things didn’t go too well.

Installation

On opening the box I found the documentation to be rather poor. The manual described an installation set up using a pair of floppy disks and a CD. The floppies were nowhere to be seen in the box and the CD appeared to hold the drivers that should have been on one floppy. The other floppy was supposed to have a configuration tool that despite much searching seemed to be missing from the CD entirely. Luckily, the SMC web site had all the required files but it wasn’t a promising start.

Things got worse when it became apparent that the PC card’s configuration options were different to those of other SMC 802.11b product’s options causing further confusion. After much fiddling and head scratching I finally got it going though.

Very Slow

Initially things looked good and I managed to connect to the web from various places in the house using my laptop. The speed was the maximum I would have expected from my broadband connection i.e. 50kbytes per second. I then tried to copy a file from the server. This seemed to be running very slowly so I tried a smaller file which proved equally slow. It then became apparent that something was badly wrong. Whilst the maximum speed on these cards is rated at 11Mbit/sec, it looked like I was barely getting a twentieth of the quoted speed. I double-checked everything and all seemed well. The card’s utility software showed 100% signal strength and connection quality so that side seemed OK too.

I contacted the SMC support line to see what they suggested. A few days later I received an email advising me to upgrade the firmware on the access point (which acts as the gateway between the wired part of the LAN and the wireless parts) and to get the latest drivers for the card. This I did.

After making their suggested changes the speed was no better. Additionally, the card kept losing the connection completely. Every few minutes I had to repeatedly click on rescan until the card managed to latch on again. Again I contacted tech support who ignored all subsequent emails so a very poor showing there.

After several weeks of tweaking, searching the web and asking around I am no nearer to getting any sort of half decent speed out of the SMC2632W and the constant dropping of the connection makes the card almost unusable.

Conclusion

It may be that I had a faulty sample but despite sending several messages to SMC tech support suggesting this and even pointing out that this was for a review, they didn’t seem bothered about replying. All in all a very disappointing showing despite the low price.  

Iain Laskey

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