At my current location, wireless internet access via Be is available at about 12Mbit/s. However for my desktop which only contains a wired ethernet interface, I've been using my WRT54G (v2) running OpenWRT to connect to the wireless network, which is WPA2 secured.

I got it working eventually, after some careful reading of the OpenWRT wiki to discover exactly which modes and combinations of modes were actually supported by the system. The main issue has been speed - it has been topping out at around 100KB/s. There was no obvious userspace load on the router, though I suspect that being a WPA2 client isn't a configuration the boxes were designed for, so perhaps there are limitations of the hardware. I'd be interested to see if it's limited when running with WPA2 as an AP, or using a different type of encryption as a client.

This evening I switched over to a Belkin F5D7132 configured in "relay" mode. I'd bought this originally to replace or supplement the single AP we use at the Surrey LUG meetings, though didn't actually get round to bringing it in until today's BringABox.

The relay mode just makes it act as a client to another AP, repeating onto its built in AP and bridging to the ethernet port. Didn't take long at all once I'd figured out which IP address it was sitting on (come on Belkin, a bit of paper in the box saying would be nice). Now downloading happily at full speed!