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There are literally millions of older Wi-Fi equipment installations that cannot benefit from the newer WPA wireless protection encryption algorithms. Primarily because the equipment manufacturers have abandoned the equipment and no longer provide updated drivers / firmware upgrades. Some manufacturers build what are known as 'passphrase generators' into their equipment. This basically allows the user to enter an easily remembered phrase and the equipment generates the WEP key based upon an algorithm built into the equipment... and there lies the rub. Every manufacturer seems to do it a bit differently, if they do it at all. There doesn't seem to be any kind of standard toward implementing WEP. This creates lots of problems when you are trying to connect devices from various manufacturers because the results from their built in passphrase generators are different across devices. With the WEP Key Generator Utility, you can generate keys based on a passphrase that is compatible with all wireless systems because all wireless network systems must support hexadecimal based keys. Instead of using the passphrase generator that is built into the router, or your wireless card on your laptop or PDA, you use the WEP Key Generator utility to generate the WEP keys and manually enter them into your wireless router settings and wireless network adapters. As you can imagine, this greatly simplifies the implementation of equipment from different manufacturers. Now you can easily use Orinoco, Netgear, and D-Link wireless cards with a Linksys, SMC or Belkin router / switch and not have to worry that one manufacturer uses ASCII based WEP keys and the other doesn't support it. You are not limited in your choice of equipment by brand. Not only do we support creating a key with a passphrase, we also have created a way to generate WEP keys based upon any particular file on your computer.