This is one of a new breed of products aimed at an anticipated boom in home networking. The idea is that, as broadband prices fall, data delivery will become ubiquitous, always available and so useful as to require spreading about.

To succeed vendors will have to bring plug-and-play simplicity to complex networking products. Actiontec has made a fair stab with this gateway, designed to allow several machines to share a cable or DSL connection.

It has four auto-sensing 10/100 switched ports and two Type I PC Card slots, one of which takes a 10Mbits/sec 802.11b (Wi-Fi) card to transform the gateway into a wireless access point; the other slot can be used for Bluetooth or HomePNA cards.

The slots will also take 11a cards - five times faster than 11b - when they become available. You may think 11a is overkill for distributing 512K broadband, but this box also allows home machines to exchange data.

Set up is a vast improvement on that of early wireless products, which were generally pitched at experts. But it isn't straightforward: the install program couldn't find a file on our system and there were a couple of mistakes in the documentation.

Actiontec says these are being fixed. You can use your browser to configure the gateway, which offers a firewall, 128bit wireless encryption and a content filter. It also clones Mac addresses, so cable users don't need to register new hardware.

Once you have one machine online, linking in others involves little more than plugging in cables, Ethernet cards or wireless adaptors. Actiontec's prices are the lowest we have seen for this class of equipment. The equivalent of this gateway and two wireless cards could have cost you well over £1,000 only a few months ago.

Price: Gateway £99.99 (inc. VAT); PC Card, USB dongle or PCI-based Wi-Fi client £74.99 (inc. VAT).

Contact: Actiontec 01189 026 890
www.actiontec.com