Buffalo 802.11n USB - Nano craze goes Draft N-sane

We love this Nano craze, seriously, and will be be the second one in line for one of these. Buffalo's preparing to slip a Draft N wireless USB adapter under your door, the WLI-UC-GN. Like other nano dongles for Bluetooth and mice this nubbin of a device barely sticks out of your computer as far as it goes in. Currently only being released in Japan at the roughly translated price of about $23 USD. Expected availability there is sometime in February. We can only expect(hope) that this will have a wider release shortly thereafter.

While speed is the most widely touted attribute of the 802.11n standard which tops out at a theoretical 600Mb/s, most of the current consumer releases of N devices top out at 300Mb/s. The WLI-UC-GN has hopped on the Draft2 standard which only clocks in at 150Mb/s. The one vital statistic that's missing from the release notes is the effective range. In a nutshell, 802.11n relies on multiple antennas and with the adapter being so small one has to wonder if range will suffer. The adapter is really inexpensive and hard to pass up but with questionable range and only 3x faster than widely adopted 802.11g it may not give us enough of an upgrade to invest in a network upgrade over g.