Netgear of Santa Clara, Calif., today announced some of the first products that will use the speed boosts called Super G and Super A/G provided in the latest generation of Atheros chipsets for 802.11a and 802.11g. The claim is the products could be capable of as much as 108Mbps.
Netgear is announcing a new set of 802.11g products (backwards compatible with 802.11b, as are all 802.11g products) that will use the Super G speed boost with the rather unceremonious names of the 108 Mbps Wireless Firewall Router (model WGT624, $149.99 MSRP) and 108 Mbps Wireless PC Card (model WG511T, $89.99 MSRP). The products will also use Netgear’s Smart Wizards software for installation and an all-new Wizard for assisting with firmware upgrades. Future firmware for the router will offer WDS repeater functions; the router comes with four 10/100 Ethernet switched ports, NAT and SPI firewall, up to 152-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), security logs, and VPN pass-through.
The company will also offer the 108 Mbps speed in its existing business-class dual-band (802.11abg) products via downloadable driver and firmware upgrade in September. The products covered include:
All three products will also be gaining WPA, 152-bit WEP, and VPN pass-through, as well.
Products using Super G and Super A/G use a mixture of technologies to increase throughput, including frame bursting (based on the 802.11e draft standard for Quality of Service on WLANs) as well as modulation tweaks and data compression. The speed boost is only available when communicating with other products using Atheros chips.
Late in July, Netgear completed a successful initial public offering, with an opening price of $14 per share, and reaching a high of $19.25 a share. The company raised $98 million by offering seven million shares on the market. At press time, Netgear was trading at $16.95 a share.
