Icron WiRanger Wi-Fi connected USB hub

Having removed all the other USB devices, we copied over Register Hardware's standard 1GB folder containing 100 10MB files. We did so three times, yielding times of 694.5s, 690.7s and 728.3s. That yields average data rates of 11.52Mbps, 11.59Mbps and 10.99Mbps.

Consistent between the first two runs but not the third. Why? Because that's when we chose to simultaneously download a batch of files from the net - clearly enough to knock back the WiRanger speed a little. Whatever, the speeds confirm the slightly-better-than-USB-1.1 speeds we saw with the iPod.

Icron's WiRanger: the Lex module provides the computer link

With 802.11g hitting around 20Mbps on a very good day in the real world, you simply can't get 480Mbps USB 2.0-speed transfers out of it. This limits the WiRanger to low bandwidth applications like hosting printer connections. But plenty of printers, even inkjets, these days come with Wi-Fi if you need a wireless and/or remote link, and they're easy to share - something you can't do with WiRanger.

This might have been less of a problem if the Lex was implemented, say, as a USB dongle, so you could connect it to a laptop and still print or access a remote hard drive while at any location within range of the Rex. But no, if you want to do that, you need to take the Lex and its power brick with you.

On the plus side, the WiRanger units are attractively designed and have to be praised for the ease with which they can be set up and used, and for operating entirely cross-platform. And if a bandwidth of around 11.5Mbps doesn't sound much, don't forget it's still sufficient to support at least two simultaneous standard-definition video streams, and certainly audio.

We had no trouble playing two episodes of the seminal 1980s claymation series The Trap Door, encoded from the DVD to H.264 for the purpose and copied over to the Rex-connected Flash drive then played back in two instances of the VLC open-source video player app. The original Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series likewise played perfectly in iTunes. It's not really enough for HD, though.

Remote media store, anyone? A nice idea, until you realise you can buy a fully kitted out network-attached storage (NAS) box for not much more than WiRanger costs - around £295 in the UK; $395 in the US - and it'll be accessible from multiple machines, not just the one the Lex module is plugged into.

WiRanger is based on Icron's ExtremeUSB technology, which essentially routes USB data over Ethernet. That includes all forms of Wi-Fi, and a move to 802.11n technology will remove many of the bandwidth constraints. But we'd really like to see a version of the product based on Powerline Ethernet. If you're going to have two units that need to be connected to the mains - as both the Lex and the Rex do - why not use the power cabling as your network infrastructure too?

Icron has co-operated on the development of just such a system with Panasonic. Why couldn't it have used the same principle here?

Verdict

Icron's impressive USB-over-Wi-Fi technology shouldn't blind us to the WiRanger's limitations. It's faster than USB 1.1, but can never match USB 2.0 thanks to its use of 802.11g. For low-bandwidth apps like remote printing, and standard-definition video and audio streaming it works well, but it's not a truly portable product.

If WiRanger were a 100-buck gadget you might feel like giving it a try anyway, but at three times that price it's got to have a clear task to be put to in order to be worth buying, and for us what it's able to do, at the speeds it's able to do them don't justify the cost.