Cisco Aironet 350 Series 11Mbps Wireless LAN PC Card Adapter ( AIR-PCM352 )

Setup was a breeze, solid equipment.


Great lil card   February 7, 2003
Anna Boyd (Fairfax, VA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

I use this card to get online at University of Virginia, its the only card supported, but they make good choices, so I went ahead and got the card. All I had to do to make it work was to plug it in my laptop's designated card slot, and *poof* XP took care of the rest. The connectivity is great, and its very simple to use.


Card's top grade, but slight problem with software   November 6, 2002
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I bought my card thru my university which uses this card for the entire system. Since my card has been installed and the drivers and ACU is already running, getting it to work with my Netgear FM114P router at home was breeze, taking just a minute to get it hooked up.

The problem came when i tried to install the driver for my brother and girlfriend's laptop. On one laptop the system hung at the end of the installation and on the other when the computer was trying to detect the hardware.

Cutting the long story short, i figured the system had just managed to install the software before it hang and thus after rebooting the laptop i could get online. whats interesting is that i didn't have to install the ACU or the card's firmware to get it to work. Well, as long as it works.... =P

Compared to linksys or netgear wireless lan cards, this one give a much better 'feel' to its build and looks a whole lot more sturdy than any other cards i've seen. and of course its from a better brand too (if it matters at all).

I guess if you're willing to fork out more than double the price for a somewhat more 'professional' card i guess this is it. if not, i would recommend the netgear MA401 card as i have absolutely no problems setting a couple of them up on my network.


One of the best I have used   September 25, 2002
Kaotic1
21 out of 21 found this review helpful

I manage the wlan at work and test numerous cards. The Cisco 350 series is what we rolled of company wide for for employee use. The Client software (ACU) included with the card is straight forward and provides great info on the current connection and link status.

One thing you can do with this card that you can't with others is modify the transmit power for the card. The primary difference between the Cisco 340 and 350 series is the transmit power. On the 350 you can change this from 1mw to 100mw (the 340 series peaks at 30mw). This feature is especially handy, especially when taking my laptop from work to home (you just don't need 100mw of transmit power in a 1200 ft. apartment).

The hardware is great (Cisco acquired Aironet around 97 I think), the software is intuitive, and is fully compatible with many authentication methods other than wep (i.e., TLS, MD5, EAP, LEAP).

So why did I give this card a 4 star rating instead of 5 stars? Three reasons:

Client side software does not roam between discontiguous networks when using advanced authentication

Client side software does not include any kind of sniff feature to see what wireless networks are within range. I have to use third party software for that.

Cisco cards do not do true rfmon passive packet acquisition. Cisco (and I think Lucent) diverged from the prism 2 chip , so i keep my Cisco card for work and keep a linksys wpc11 (prism2 chipset) for "network analysis".

Hope this helps. Peace to all wifi junkies out there.