I'm writing this article comfortably resting on my couch, with my laptop actually on my lap, but I could just as easily write from anywhere in my apartment ... all thanks to Lucent (and Apple).

Now that wireless PCMCIA cards are available for less than $100, and prices for base stations have dropped to $150 or less, I decided to buy in. I decided on the ORiNOCO Silver card (formerly Lucent's WaveLAN) since I had read good things about the quality of the card, it was about half the cost of Cisco's 802.11b offering, and had the broadest OS support (including OpenBSD and Windows 2000, both of which are running on my laptop). I could have spent a little more for the Gold version, which supports 128-bit WEP, but since WEP is essentially broken, I didn't consider that a major factor. For the base station, I picked the Linksys WAP11 wireless access point. Clearly its best advantage is price, but since I already have a router (also Linksys) I didn't need the features offered by an Airport or other gateway-type device.

So far, the experience has been very positive. It took a while to get everything all set up - I wouldn't recommend it for the novice, but the process was straightforward and the docucmentation was good for both products. The only issue I came across was poor reception when I placed the Linksys under my desk. After moving it higher up, reception was good throughout the apartment.

I'll have to use it for a while to give a final verdict, but I have to say it's one of the cooler tech-geek toys I've purchased. I have yet to go war driving ... I'll post updates when I've used it longer.