Tim Higgins covers Buffalo's announcement of its "125" gear: This equipment uses the latest firmware and chips from Broadcom, which Buffalo very neatly clarifies has about 34 Mbps of throughput and 125 Mbps of signaling bandwidth. This is quite fair: it's one of the clearer statements from any vendor about real-world performance of increasingly higher signaling rates, or rates at which symbols are encoded. Real throughput measures the actual data transferring end-to-end over the network.

Buffalo has its wireless gateway ready to go now for about $110 street price, Higgins notes. The unit supports all current security options. The CardBus (PC Card) and PCI cards will ship next month for about $100 list.

Each of the new Buffalo devices, plus some existing Buffalo equipment, will support its AOSS or AirStation One Touch Secure System. AOSS is supposed to set up an encryption key between a base station and a client adapter when you hold down a button for a few seconds on the access point and then run client software on the computer you're connecting. I just spent 40 minutes with two fresh-out-of-the-box Buffalo units (the WBR2-G54 AirStation and WLI-CB-G54A PC Card) without reaching a successful conclusion. I'm talking to Buffalo about this to see where I went wrong. This obviously can't be every user's experience.

Buffalo also announced a partnership with my editorial and advertising partner, Jiwire. The Jiwire Portable Hotspot Locator will be bundled with the software distributed by Buffalo on CD.