I have had a PRISMIQ Commander sitting waiting for an opportunity to work. I finally bought a HP Compaq nc4010 from Geeks.com. I had to go to ebay to get a miniPCI WiFi card of the correct type (W500 a/b/g). My Netgear firewall has 802.11b but I wanted to have more.
The quick setup is pretty good. For some reason I wasn't finding the box on 192.168.1.1 but that may be because my router uses that address. Looking in ZoneAlarm, I found accesses from 192.168.1.254 so I tried there and there she blows.
I went ahead and updated the firmware to 1.1 from prismiq.com, very smooth - it added a save/download config option that is appreciated. The setup wizard was good - competitors should try this also. The box supports DDNS for getting your broadband a fixed address through DynDNS.org - very good touch.
I did run into a snag as I assigned the wireless to an unised range in 192.168.1.xxx. PRISMIQ Commander warned me this was a conflict but not how to solve. I spent alot of time on ZoneAlarm, etc. Finally, I set the PRISMIQ to give the wireless clients 192.168.0.xxx addresses and bam, I had Google staring at me from Internet Explorer.
I went ahead and set very strong security - WPA AES encrypted. I needed to switch to WinXP (SP2) managing instead of the Atheros utility but that went well. Now it would take a supercomputer (or NSA) to break into the WiFi
:-)
We have a 3 story house and the PRISMIQ is in the basement against one wall. I went to the opposite side of the house on the 1st and second floors. Still a good signal as reported by Windows and browsing was good - I streamed CNN video on the second floor very well (damn their ads on CNN).
I will look at the traffic monitoring, their biggest differentiation, soon. Looks good.
Overall impression - very good - the management and security features available are top notch. This includes MAC level security if you want it. You can set the unit into several modes including WiFi access point, WiFi Extender, etc. Other companies make you buy other types of items.
With the price reduction on the PRISMIQ.com website down to $49.95 (no rebates, yay), I think they have a winner if they can get the word out.
The quick setup is pretty good. For some reason I wasn't finding the box on 192.168.1.1 but that may be because my router uses that address. Looking in ZoneAlarm, I found accesses from 192.168.1.254 so I tried there and there she blows.
I went ahead and updated the firmware to 1.1 from prismiq.com, very smooth - it added a save/download config option that is appreciated. The setup wizard was good - competitors should try this also. The box supports DDNS for getting your broadband a fixed address through DynDNS.org - very good touch.
I did run into a snag as I assigned the wireless to an unised range in 192.168.1.xxx. PRISMIQ Commander warned me this was a conflict but not how to solve. I spent alot of time on ZoneAlarm, etc. Finally, I set the PRISMIQ to give the wireless clients 192.168.0.xxx addresses and bam, I had Google staring at me from Internet Explorer.
I went ahead and set very strong security - WPA AES encrypted. I needed to switch to WinXP (SP2) managing instead of the Atheros utility but that went well. Now it would take a supercomputer (or NSA) to break into the WiFi
:-)
We have a 3 story house and the PRISMIQ is in the basement against one wall. I went to the opposite side of the house on the 1st and second floors. Still a good signal as reported by Windows and browsing was good - I streamed CNN video on the second floor very well (damn their ads on CNN).
I will look at the traffic monitoring, their biggest differentiation, soon. Looks good.
Overall impression - very good - the management and security features available are top notch. This includes MAC level security if you want it. You can set the unit into several modes including WiFi access point, WiFi Extender, etc. Other companies make you buy other types of items.
With the price reduction on the PRISMIQ.com website down to $49.95 (no rebates, yay), I think they have a winner if they can get the word out.
