Slashdot Mirror

By Tim Pozar - pozar@lns.com
for the Bay Area Wireless User Group

1. Background
   1. Introduction

      With the unlicensed use of 802.11b radio Ethernet devices in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical band that has been set aside for such use, there is confusion of what is allowed or limited by the Federal Communication Commissions Rules and Regulations. This paper is meant to help guide folks through the cryptic nature of these rules.

      This paper does not cover other legal issues of using these devices such as FCC type-acceptance, Radio Frequency Radiation issues (ie. ANSI RFR levels) or Appropiate Use Policies (AUPs) of ISPs you may connect to.

   2. What is the FCC's involvement in this mess?

      The FCC is a regulation body whose purpose was defined in the Communications Act of 1934 as:

      "For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges, for the purpose of the national defense, for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communications, and for the purpose of securing a more effective execution of this policy by centralizing authority heretofore granted by law to several agencies and by granting additional authority with respect to interstate and foreign commerce in wire and radio communication, there is created a commission to be known as the "Federal Communications Commission", which shall be constituted as hereinafter provided, and which shall execute and enforce the provisions of this chapter."

      The FCC, with the Act of 1934, was empowered to regulate wire and wireless communications. Wired communications regulation was needed to monitor and regulate monopolies. Wireless regulation is needed as the spectrum is finite. The FCC is the "traffic cop" to ensure that communications is not interfered with.

2. Part 15 of the Rules and Regulations

   Almost every bit of spectrum is regulated by the FCC with the exception of extreamly high or low frequency spectrum and bands managed by the Intergovernmental Radio Advisory Committee (IRAC) for the military and other goverment orginizations, by licensing operators of radio equipment. The part of the FCC's rules that cover the operation of equipment that does not need a license is (3) Except as shown in paragraphs (b)(3) (i), (ii) and (iii) of this section, if transmitting antennas of directional gain greater than 6 dBi are used the peak output power from the intentional radiator shall be reduced below the stated values in paragraphs (b)(1) or (b)(2) of this section, as appropriate, by the amount in dB that the directional gain of the antenna exceeds 6 dBi.

   • (i) Systems operating in the 2400-2483.5 MHz band that are used exclusively for fixed, point-to-point operations may employ transmitting antennas with directional gain greater than 6 dBi provided the maximum peak output power of the intentional radiator is reduced by 1 dB for every 3 dB that the directional gain of the antenna exceeds 6 dBi."

3. Lets dissect this section...
   • Part 15.247(b)(1) defines the maximum power that an intentional radiator can put out as 1 watt.

   • Part 15.247(b)(2) doesn't apply as it is covering devices in the 902-928 MHz band and 802.11b devices are in the 2400-2483.5 MHz band.

   • Part 15.247(b)(3) covers the need for limiting the amount of radiation the "intentional radiator" can emit with "directional gain" antennas. It says that in general (with an exception coming up) that if the gain of the antenna system is more than 6 dBi, the intentional radiator needs to be turned down to keep the emission at the 1 watt maximum plus 6 dBi (36 dBm or 4 watts EIRP). The FCC encorages the use of directional antennas. With that they give you 6 dBi more power for not poluting the rest of your space with radiation that is not needed to do what you need to do.

   • Part 15.247(b)(3)(i) covers the need for limiting the amount of radiation the "intentional radiator" can emit running "fixed, point-to-point" with "directional gain" antennas. This means that the transmitter is mounted not on a moblie device and is talking to one other transmitter.

Do we need to turn down the transmitter?

1. Omni-directional or Point to Multi-point paths...

   15.247(b)(3) makes the assumption that you are running a point to multi-point network much like an Apple Airport or Cisco/Aironet AP box with a number of computers connecting to the network. They may be randomly surrounding the access point so you are not using a directional antenna.

   But what does the FCC mean when they limit the "intentional radiator" to one watt?

   This is a critical sticking point in understanding what the FCC is talking about. There is some question of what an "intentional radiator" consists of and what and where exactly is 1 watt measured. Unfortunatly if you just look at these poorly written rules you will not understand what the FCC means here. One has to look a bit deeper to the "Report and Order" and Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" that generated this section of the rules.

   Things get a little clearer when we read this sentence in paragraph 4 of the Report and Order...

   • "The current regulations limit spread spectrum systems to a maximum peak transmitter output power of one watt. When operating at that power level, the maximum directional gain of the associated antenna may not exceed 6 dBi, resulting in a maximum equivalent isotropically radiated power (EIRP) of four watts, i.e., 6 dBW."
   With the old rules they are refering to the "intentional radiator" as a whole with a directional antenna can't exceed 6 dBw or 36 dBm and the antenna gain can't be more than 6 dBI. The transmitter can be up to one watt.

   In order to know if we are legal or if we need to turn down the transmitter we need to know the gain of your "intentional radiator". Let's say your access point actually puts out 1 watt of power and you want to put an omni-directiona antenna on it that has a gain of 5 dBi such as the ORiNOCO Range Extender Antenna".

   We know the gain of the antenna, the transmitter but we also need to know the loss of the transmission line going to the antenna as this attenuats the transmitter output power going into the antenna. Looking up the attenuation of a common coax cable such as RG-8 on an coax attenuation table we find that at 2.4 GHz we have 16 dB of loss with 100 feet of cable. With a 10 foot cable your loss is about 1.6 dB. So your new "intentional radiator" will be radiating transmitter power output plus antenna gain minus coax loss or (30dBm + 5 dBi - 1.6 db) or 33.4 dBm or 2.2 watts EIRP.

   Since this is a non-directional antenna you are limited to 1 watt EIRP or 30 dBm. The transmitter will need to be turned down 3.4 dB to 26.6 dBm or about 0.45 watts (450 mW) to get you back to 30 dBm or 1 watt EIRP.

   If you think about this you may ask, "why add an omni-directional gain antenna it if I already was at 30 dBm?" You would be correct that it would be a waste of time. But if you had something like an Apple Airport that will only put out 15 dBm or 30 mW then you can add an omni-directional gain antenna and it will extend your "roaming" area. In fact you can add up to 15 dB of gain with an omni-directional antenna before you need to attenuate the output of the Wavelan card in the Airport.

2. Use a directional antenna and get more power - or - this is where the Rules get even more hard to follow...

   Part 15.247(b)(3) actually gives you a free 6 dBi if you use a directional antenna your "intentional radiator". How do the do this? Only if the gain of the antenna is over 6 dBi will the Feds want you to roll back the EIRP of your "intentional radiator". You don't have to do it right at 1 watt EIRP. When would you do this? Say if you have an access point in the corner of a building and it needs to aim back into the work area. You don't want an omni-directional antenna as about 75% of the power would be going out the windows. Why not use a directional to keep the signal in the building and penetrate through the walls better? If we have antenna gain of about 12 dBi and in this case the antenna is a directional antenna. With the transmitter putting out 30 dBm and the coax has 1.6 dB of loss we have an "intentional radiator" that is putting out (30 dBm + 12 dBi - 1.6 dB) or 40.4 dBm or just over 10 watts EIRP. Since the antenna gain is 12 dBi and we have to reduce the power of this "intentional radiator" 1 db for every db we go over 6 dBi of the antenna we would have to roll the power back to 34.4 dBm or 2.2 watts EIRP (40.4 dBm - (12 dBi - 6 dBi)). Well, it is slightly better than 30 dBm or 1 watt EIRP.

3. Fixed, point-to-point paths and get even more power...

   There is another exception to this section of the FCC rules. Part 15.247(b)(3)(i) covers systems that are "fixed, point-to-point". That means this path only has two transmitters involved and they are bolted down by never moving their locations. Automobiles may not apply. An example would be if you have an access point and a user that is a couple blocks or even tens of miles away that you want to connect to.

   This exception is more lenient as you only need to turn down the "intentional radiator" 1 dB for every 3 dB of signal over the 6 dBi of the antenna system. The FCC does this as it knows that these paths will not likely not be omni directional on each end and will have less of a chance to interfere with others as well as the need to span some long distances.

   Lets look at an example using the same antenna, transmission line and transmitter as above. Without turning anything down we had an "intentional radiator" that was producing 40 dBm or 10 watts EIRP. Since the antenna gain is 12 dBi and we have to reduce the power of this "intentional radiator" 1 db for every 3 db we go over 6 dBi of antenna gain we would have to roll the power back to 38.4 dBm or 7 watts EIRP (40.4 - (12 dBi - 6 dBi) / 3).

Real world examples...

1. Omnidirectional Point-to-Multi-point...

2. Directional Point-to-Multi-point...

3. Directional Fixed, Point-to-Point...

   Recently I put up a short path between myself and a neighbor about 2 blocks away (.2 miles). I have an Apple Airport that uses the Lucent Wavelan Silver card that puts out 30 mW or about 15 dBm. The antennas have a gain of 24 dBi with a transmission line loss of about 6 db. This gives me an "intentional radiator" power of 48 dBi. Since the antenna gain is 18 dBi over the 6 dBi that the FCC gives you and since it is a fixed, point-to-point link I would have to limit my

   [...]

   Since the little Wavelan card only puts out 15 dBm, I am legal as far as part 15.247 goes.

Quicky Definitions...

1. deciBels - dB

   dB, or one tenth of a Bel, is a unit of mesurment that looks at the ratio of one value to another. Gain or loss can be measured in dB. The dB scale is an exponential scale using the formula log(ratio)*10. This means that 3 dB is about twice the power, 10 dB is 10 times the power, 13 dB is about 20 times the power and 20 dB is 100 times the power.

2. dBm

   dBm is deciBels referenced to a value of 1 miliWatt of power. Power over or under 1mW would be plus or minus dBm respectively.

   If you have a transmitter that produces 1 watt of power that would be 1000 times more than 1 mW so that converts to 30 dBm.

3. dBW

   dBW is deciBels referenced to a value of 1 Watt of power. Power over or under 1 Watt would be plus or minus dBW respectively.

4. Effective Isotropic Radiated Power - EIRP

   Effective Isotropic Radiated Power defines the gain of an antenna over an "isotropic antenna" that would radiate equally in all directions.

   An example would be a light bulb. A lightbulb is designed to radiate light equally well in all directions, except the direction that the base is in.

   If you have an antenna that radiates better in one direction than another, it would likely have gain in this direction. The amount of gain would be shown as "dBi" or dB gain (or loss) over an "isotropic antenna".

   To further our example above, if we have a light bulb and put it in front of a mirror, we would be taking the light radiation that would be heading in the direction of the mirror and reflecting it back in the same direction of the light not directed towards the mirror. Hence you would have twice the amount of light going in the direction of the refelction. As we are doubling the amount of light, we have a "gain" of 3dB or 3dBi.

I myself live in a bandwidth black hole which I just happen to be in the center of. So, I actually started researching and buying gear to hook into work's T1, which is about 4.8 miles away. The gear I decided on was two Orinoco (or WaveLAN as they used to be called) cards with Linux boxes to match to keep costs down (besides, Linux makes for a great wireless router). My antennas are 24dBi gain Hyperlink parabolic grid antennas. I already have the cards working in my Linux installations and am ready to hook up the antennas soon. The only tricky part is that my path to work is slightly obscured so I'm hoping I have enough power and gain to be able to punch though. Hopefully the bandwidth gods will look favorably upon me. I've never had a high speed connect at home (and probably never will if this doesn't work :/)

One of the coolest projects I found while researching this was the HPWREN project at UCSD. Check out their pictures, it's hella cool. In a nutshell they are running a 45Mbps (802.11a) wireless backbone across the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve using mostly off-the-shelf equipment, for the purpose of hooking together the facilities strewn across it. They even have remote cameras hooked in that can be remotely controlled through the network, and other testing stations that send data back to them in realtime.
I dropped an email to the project lead and I asked him what kind of gear they used. He said they used a Western Multiplex Tsunami for their backend, Hyperlink for their antennas and WaveLAN and Cisco Aironet for their PCMCIA cards (you can now see how I constructed my parts list :)) I also asked how he got around mountains and such.
Well, in certain places they have powered relay stations. Naturally I wondered how they were powered, and he said some of them they could get electricity to, but others they actually have solar panels powering the relays. Damn. For you real hackers he mentioned there was a parts list for the solar power array somewhere on the website, but I never bothered to try and find it.

I've noticed some arguments regarding amplifying 802.11, and thought I'd help clear it up. FCC Part 15.247 governs the unlicensed ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) band, and dictates that you can amplify the signal up to 1 watt (1000mw) This gets tricky when you start using directional antennas >6dBi gain though. You may find more detailed info here..

and dont mind bulk, an Orinoco 802.11 to RS232 converter might be good. Hey, it works with everyones favorite 802.11 card.
Then again, whats wrong with the cable?

and dont mind bulk, an Orinoco 802.11 to RS232 converter might be good. Hey, it works with everyones favorite 802.11 card.
Then again, whats wrong with the cable?

The AP-1000 won't support 802.11A cards. You need the new AP-2000 that contains more RAM and a stronger CPU and can hold both 802.11B and 802.11A cards.

Why not hooking this thing up to a Wireless-to-Ethernet-converter? Of course you would need an AP for this, but hey ;)

I've got some experience with setting up a wireless home network, and here are some of the things that I discovered. First of all, my general setup: I've got a ZyXEL Prestige 642 DSL router that I wanted to share between several machines, most notably a Dell laptop that I wanted to network wirelessly. The first thing that I did was buy a 5-port Linksys 10/100-BaseT autosensing Ethernet hub; I had been running the DSL router straight into my main desktop PC's NIC with a crossover cable. Now there's a hub, so the ground work is done.

The first thing you'll need is (obviously) a wireless access point. For this, I would recommend the Linksys WAP 11 wireless NAP. This is an inexpensive (~$240) piece of equipment that has worked flawlessly for me thus far. There are more expensive and more capable access points, but IMHO you can't go wrong with this one, at least for a home setup. Note that this access point is a straight pass-through; it does not do DHCP or anything like that. For me, this isn't an issue because my DSL router acts as a DHCP server.

Some more notes about the WAP11: it comes "out of the box" configured with an IP address of 192.168.1.250. Again, this was fine for me since my home network is 192.168.*.* based. Obviously, this can be changed, but the provided configuration software is Windows-only. You can configure the unit either by plugging in the provided USB cable and running the USB-based configuration program, or you can do it via a SNMP-based configuration client. Oh, and before I forget .. the access point needs to be plugged into either a 10BaseT or an autosensing 10/100BaseT hub! It will not work with a 100BaseT-only hub!

Okay, so now you've got an access point plugged into your network hub. The next thing you need is a wireless card. If you're networking a laptop, grab a Lucent ORiNOCO 802.11 Silver PC card. Linksys makes its own wireless PC card, and if you're buying the Linksys access point, you may be tempted to buy the same brand for the PC card. Don't. Linksys's card works fine, but its range is limited; it is far less than what they advertise. The radio that the Lucent cards use is far, far better. Many people have reported tripling their ranges when switching from the Linksys to the Lucent card.

I've had no problems with the Lucent card. Hell, they even include the source code for Linux drivers on the installation CD! The Linux driver you're looking for is "wavelan2_cs", and it supports 64-bit WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) (40-bit, actually) encryption. For the sake of full disclosure, however, it should be pointed out that WEP's security is under fire (expanded PDF version)

In general, if you're looking for raw speed, you're not going to get it with 802.11b (or, at least, you aren't going to get wired speeds.) For me, I mainly use my network to surf the Internet, and my DSL downstream bandwidth maxes out at 1 Mbps or so .. anything above that is frosting on the cake. 802.11b offers a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 11Mbps, but in practice you'll probably get half that, even if you're in the immediate vicinity of the access point. If all you're looking to do is be able to sit out in your backyard and read Slashdot, that's probably more than sufficient. If you need 100Mbps+ speeds to your local machines, you need to drill some holes and run some cable. Personally, I think the wireless cards are just plain fun. I can read Slashdot from the neighbor's yard, for Christ's sake. :-)

There are a lot of people looking to build out MAN's in their cities, with some in Seattle and San Francisco already running. You can tap into them and get free Internet access and share files with your neighbors.

Check out the following links:

• http://www.wavelan.com
• http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/wireless/2000-Apr il/001371.html
• http://www.notwise.net/LUGOJ/2001/Jan/0764.html

Lucent/Orinoco has a wireless 'residential gateway' product that has a built-in 56k modem. It can also act as a bridge to an existing 10baseT LAN. It has worked excellent. I'm not sure what OS it runs though. Unfortunately, you do have to have a windows box to configure it. It just sends some stuff over the network to configure the box so it probably wouldn't be that hard to reverse engineer.
RG-1000

If you have to have free software in the equation you can always control the above using FreeBase.

My understanding is that the airport is actually one of the Wavelan RG-1000's that has been relabeled, but I don't know that for sure.

If this is the lucent product, then my understanding about the way lucent handles under-warranty repairs is consistent with the apple policy - They don't repair them, they replace them. I suspect it's cheaper to just replace the hardware (since it is obviously not very expensive) than to pay someone to figure out what in the (#*@$ blew up.

My understanding is that the airport is actually one of the Wavelan RG-1000's that has been relabeled, but I don't know that for sure.

If this is the lucent product, then my understanding about the way lucent handles under-warranty repairs is consistent with the apple policy - They don't repair them, they replace them. I suspect it's cheaper to just replace the hardware (since it is obviously not very expensive) than to pay someone to figure out what in the (#*@$ blew up.

What? First to *use* USB (not just put it on the board).

That's an argument about their choice of peripherals, not about their support of i/o standards. It's marketing, not engineering. (Not that marketing is not important, just a different discussion.)

First to use Firewire. Using 32bit Nubus when PCs where using ISA slots.

Still using Nubus years after the PC had moved to PCI. Indeed, I'd count Nubus along with SCSI--in both cases Apple went with a clearly superior solution early on, but ended up being held back as the mainstream PC standards, driven by the much larger marketplace, managed to improve much faster and yet be much cheaper than what Apple used.

The "laughably inferior video card" may be so for FPS, but actually performs quite well for graphic artists. Makes me wonder why they specced it.

"The Macintosh does not have any decent 3d support, so therefore we can pretend that 3d support is not important." Any $9 graphics card is just fine for 2d, although I seriously doubt that 16 MB and a 230 MHz RAMDAC are really good enough for any serious graphic artists. The simple fact is that the Mac does not do 3d well, and that that is simply pitiful in this day and age. And no, 3d is not just used for games; you may be shocked, but there are actually graphics artists that work in three dimensions too! (They use PCs and Unix workstations.)

BTW, the only decent 802.11 system out there that can hold a candle to the AirPort system is the Lucent Orinoco system, which is slightly more expensive and a lot harder to set up.

I don't know how hard it is to set up, but IIRC for what you admit is only a slightly higher price it has a much greater wireless range.

How many makers right now are putting out machines with DDR RAM? Last I checked, not many. Sure they're ramping up, but Apple would be stupid (and possibly insane) to be on the top of the curve for every trend. Their machines would be even more overpriced and they could end up with a Rambus/Intel fiasco on their hands if they made the wrong choice. Better to let someone like Intel make that mistake and fight the battles worth fighting (i.e the ones pretty much won already like USB, firewire)

As this thread was initially about system *performance* (as opposed to capabilities), let me tell you that DDR is MUCH more "a battle worth fighting" on this metric. But you have a very valid point--indeed, I agree with you completely. The thing is, what you're saying assumes that Apple will be designing and validating its own chipsets, incompatible with the real world, every time they want to add a feature. In such an environment, it is indeed not worth it to come out with a DDR chipset now. Moreover, while it would have been worth it to come out with a PC133 chispet a year ago and a DDR chipset in around 3 months time, the fact that Apple is the one designing and validating every new chipset is the reason these chipsets are always a year behind the times--it's a very complicated process and Apple's engineers are understandably stretched thin to try to replicate the work of dozens of companies in the PC world.

That's the problem with having a vertical monopoly; there's not enough room for differentiated product lines and innovation. In the PC world, there are 2 or 3 major chipset manufacturers competing to come out with the fastest chipsets with the most new features, and another couple players who drop in to keep competition high. There are about a dozen major motherboard manufacturers, who compete to best implement these chipsets with the most features at the lowest price. Because the PC RAM market is so large, you have all the DRAM manufacturers in the world driving chipset innovation as well. Finally, because PCs are used for general purpose tasks and because there's an independent benchmarking industry in the PC marketplace, all these people know that they won't be able to get away with a single toy SIMD benchmark as an overall measure of "performance"--thus they all feel pressure to create components which actually work fast over a wide variety of circumstances. Hence the PC market is moving into 2.1 and 3.2 GB/s FSBs while the Mac is finally hitting 1.1 GB/s. Oh, and while we're on the subject, it turns out I was wrong: you won't be able to buy a G4 with on-die L2 cache until the G4+ is released in March. Only then will the G4 finally be approaching clock-for-clock parity with x86 chips (according to SPECcpu, i.e. a real benchmark suite).

Now, I'm not saying there aren't some important tangible benefits to Apple's vertical monopoly. I just don't think they're worth the drawback: machines which cost twice as much as the equivalent PC did when it was released 9 months ago.

One final word re: price/performance -- find a notebook that can compete in that area with the new powerbook. Good luck.

Here you finally have a point: the new powerbook is very impressive and indeed competitive with PCs in price/performance. One important reason why is that AMD has not yet had a viable notebook CPU for the mainstream and performance ends of the market, so therefore Intel has a monopoly over that segment and thus performance notebooks tend to cost as much as powerbooks. Conversely, Apple has seen itself frozen out of the market it practically invented with the first powerbooks, as the portable market becomes more and more dominated by corporate consumers. Thus you have a reversal of the situation in the desktop PC market: Intel is getting away with monopoly pricing, while Apple is heavily discounting to try to break back into a market they've nearly lost.

Still, no matter how I might try to talk bad about it, there's no doubt the new powerbooks are very competitive. On the other hand, the situation is decidedly *not* as Apple has presented it. Here's what Apple has to say on the matter:


Sony Vaio Z505...........PowerBook G4

12.1-inch display........15.2-inch wide-screen display
Magnesium alloy..........99.5% pure grade CP1 titanium
650MHz Pentium III.......400 MHz PowerPC G4
No optical drive.........Slot-loading DVD-ROM
2 hours battery life.....5 hours battery life
Not wireless ready.......AirPort antenna built-in
1.15 inches thick........1 inch thick
$2549*...................$2599*

(Taken from here.)

Now let's look at what the actual facts on that Sony Z505 really are.

First off, let's take note of the fact that contrary to Apple's blatant misrepresentation, the Z505 with a P3-650 actually costs $2250, not "$2549". But what's $300 among friends? Well, we can use some of that money to buy the Z505 a 6-hour battery, so hahaha on you. The cost is now $2450, or $150 less than the Mac. Also while the powerbook may be a miraculous 3.8 mm thinner than the Z505, the important measure is of course weight; the powerbook, at 5.3 pounds, is 41% heavier than the 3.75 pound Z505--which makes sense, as they really serve different purposes. Indeed, the low weight (and its huge popularity) is the reason the Z505 is so underpowered for its price (for a PC that is), but we'll disregard that for now.

Unfortunately, there's no way to buy the Vaio as unloaded as those powerbooks: in particular, no way to buy it without at least Word 2000. Nor is there any way to purchase Word 2001 with our brand new powerbook at the Apple Store. We could buy it from MS for $400 but that doesn't seem quite fair. Instead we'll upgrade both machines to Office.

Where does that put us now?


Sony Vaio Z505...........PowerBook G4

12.1-inch display........15.2-inch wide-screen display
Magnesium alloy..........99.5% pure grade CP1 titanium
650MHz Pentium III.......400 MHz PowerPC G4
No optical drive.........Slot-loading DVD-ROM
6 hours battery life.....5 hours battery life
Not wireless ready.......AirPort antenna built-in
1.15 inches thick........1 inch thick
12 GB HD.................10 GB HD
3.75 pounds*.............5.3 pounds
$2650....................$3060

*Longer battery adds weight from this original measurement, but I couldn't find out how much.

What's missing? Well, the DVD player, for one thing. An external one adds $400 to the Z505's cost, making it just a hair cheaper than the powerbook. The 650 MHz P3 is in reality a good deal faster than the 400 MHz G4, but by using the right programs an argument can be made that the G4 comes close. "AirPort antenna built-in" is a red-herring, since you still need to spend $100 for the AirPort card. I looked it up, and the first place I checked had an Orinoco card for $160. Again, I'm almost positive this card has much better range than AirPort. Eh, let's look it up, shall we? Well, AirPort only goes a measely up to 150 feet. Orinoco goes...let's see...up to 1750 feet. Hmm. Guess the "built-in antenna" isn't working too well, is it??

So what do we end up with? The new powerbook is almost exactly the same price as a similarly configured Z505, except that the Z505 has a tad more HD space, has an extra hour on the battery, and, sorry to say, is the faster machine. Alternatively, you can get the Z505 without a DVD player and save $400.

Meanwhile, the powerbook has a luscious 15.2" screen, while the Z505 is stuck with a 12.1" which, while quite small, at least manages to almost hit the resolution of the powerbook (1024x768 vs. 1152x768). The benefit of giving up the nice screen and the internal DVD is up to 1.55 pounds of heft and of course that extra hour.

In other words, it's arguably a tossup. Of course it's a bad comparison because one is a sub-notebook and the other a full-sizer, but Apple chose it, not me. Still, it's worth noting that the Z505 is perhaps the most overpriced laptop around, so it's not such a surprise that Apple chose it when making a comparison.

Well phew! Aren't we enlightened? Did I pass? (It wasn't that tough, I let Apple "find a notebook that can compete in [price/performance] with the new powerbook" for me!)

Now it's my turn: find a desktop Mac that can compete in (price/1.5)/performance with a similarly equipped desktop PC--and I mean in a wide variety of benchmarks, not just Photoshop and RC5. (Indeed, it would be tough to do that even with Photoshop, assuming one actually used a complete Photoshop benchmark like PSbench.)

Good luck. Unfortunately, there are very few good cross-platform benchmarks to consult; the most well-respected cross-platform benchmark in the world, SPECcpu, shows the G4 in a rather unflattering light--indeed, because of this Motorola hasn't even released official scores for the G4, making it the only current general-purpose CPU family I can think of for which SPEC scores are not available. Oh wait, I lied: there's no SPEC scores for Cyrix chips either. However, there are SPEC scores for the P3, P4, the AMD K7, for Sun's UltraSparc II and III, for IBM's POWER3 chip which is sorta related to the G3 kinda sorta, for the Alpha EV67, and the MIPS R12000 and the HP PA-RISC 8600-just in the past year. The point is, every real chip releases SPEC scores, usually early and often. The best we have for the brand-spanking-new G4+ is an *estimate* for the outdated (in fact retired) SPEC95 suite, and man it's not too pretty. Of course, Motorola can always complain that they don't have a very good Fortran compiler, which is key to a good SPECfp score (their SPECint score sucks too, though); still, this is no one's fault but their own, unless of course they never meant the G4 or G4+ to be a high-performance general-purpose chip (oh that's right, they didn't; they built it for the embedded market).

Other cross-platform benchmarks are invariably much less trustworthy, because they are almost always binary only and are never of the breadth or depth of the SPEC suite. Picking Photoshop, for example, is just plain dumb, as Photoshop is simply better optimized on the Mac than on the PC (alternatively, we could benchmark Word and see which runs it faster). There's a nice collection of published cross-platform Mac vs. x86 results here; it's worth perusing, even though most of these programs make *very* poor overall benchmarks, taken as a whole they at least provide some semblence of a big picture. Needless to say, I think your task will be pretty difficult, even if there were a good way to compare performance across the two platforms.

I'm looking around at both cards and access points with linux compatibility, here's what I've found. It seems 802.11b wireless networking is definitely getting cheaper and a number of decent products have been showing up at half previous typical prices. D-Link and SMC are leading the low end of the market with decent quality products and at least stated linux support and Orinico/Lucent and Aironet/Cisco are the leaders if you want a more robust feature set for your access point (in particular, support for external antennas).

PCMCIA Cards

• For cards, the cheapest decent card I've been able to find is the D-Link DWL-650, which can be had for around $120 from a reputable web retailer. However, while D-Link claims linux support in their FAQ, I can't find a driver to download from their FTP and a google search didn't reveal anything elsewhere. Haven't really looked hard, but dubious with that in mind. I should also note that the D-Link claims shorter ranges (1,000 ft. v. 1,500) than most of the other cards/access points, but I suspect that has little real world relevance.
• The next best option seems to be the SMC 2632W, which has linux drivers available for download (haven't tried them out, though). It tends to run about $20-30 more from similar sources, but looks like a good product and appears to have better support.
• After that, its a tossup in the $200-300 range from the major networking manufacturers. I don't see a clear advantage of any of them over the cheaper products, but haven't looked at power consumption levels and comparison tests from major publications aren't new enough to include these products (that I've seen).

Access Points

For those who are also interested in what's going on with access points, including linux support on configuration:

• Currently thinking about the D-Link DWL-1000AP which goes for a little under $300 if you look around for a good web retailer. Main downside is a lack of linux support in configuration software (needed to set static IPs by address), though this isn't a big deal for me as I run a mixed network. Too bad it doesn't have a nice mini-web server for management like my HP printer (LaserJet 2100NT). They list telnet support in the data sheet, but its not clear to me if you can telnet to the hub to make changes ...
• Another potentially good and cheap model is the SMC 2652W, but supply seems to be limited on this right now. Again, no linux configuration utilities, but you can console connect via RS-232, which the D-Link doesn't have. SMC has linux drivers available for its PCMCIA card now.

Unfortunately, neither of these have the antenna adapter that some of the Lucent Orinoco (formerly WaveLAN) access points feature, but they also don't cost $700+ (its more for the 2 radio model). Not really much of an issue for household use (unless you have a multilevel apartment with concrete flooring), but if you want to cover multiple houses, roam around farther outdoors, or set up a free wireless LAN (slashdot discussion) for people in the area [SF for me] (I could run a really popular access point, living across the street from Moscone). There are a number of other good access points from Cisco/Aironet, HP, Intel, etc., but these are the standouts for price/performance in my research.

Regards, RJS

I bought the RG-1000 gateway and an Orinoco silver card a few days ago and after a bit of fiddling had my linux notebook up and running at 11mbs. The windows client software was better at things like measuring signal strength & noise with a shiny little GUI. Range and performance seem to be very good. One problem with the RG gatway product is that it requires a Windoes system to set up the initial configuration.

URL would be www.wavelan.com.

Another option depending on driver ability would be the 802.11b stuff from Compaq. I noticed that they are selling their gateway software CD for $125 which means you can build your own access point on an existing system for the cost of the software and a PCI wireless card.

I have wireless Internet provided by elite.net. They use the 2.4ghz WaveLAN II. Its capable of 11mbit. I love my connection. I can drive around with a laptop at 55mph and browse the web at 1 mbit. I have a stationary setup in my house. I uses an ethernet bridge so its converted to 10mbit, and easily compatable with most computers. I see this as a very likely widespread option for the next phase of the Internet. I pay $45 a month for always on broadband, and I recommend it to anyone in the area. The $45 account is for a min speed of 384k/s up and down. I get well over a mbit for $45 a month. (check out elite.net for more info) --Mike Hull (highway@elite.net)

It depends on what wireless technology you're using, but here in my own private geek compound I run Orinoco (Lucent) Wavelan Gold wireless cards in 128-bit RC4 encryption mode.

This is quite easy to set up under Linux using the wireless extensions to the standard pcmcia services . You will have a switch branch in your wireless.opts file that looks something like

# Default Lucent Wavelan IEEE
# Note : wvlan_cs driver only,
# and version 1.0.4+ for encryption support
*,*,*,00:60:1D:*)
INFO="Wavelan IEEE ad-hoc"
ESSID="Secure Network"
MODE="Ad-hoc"
CHANNEL="3" #2.422GHz
RATE="auto"
KEY="1234-5648-9abc-def1-2345-6789-ab"
;;
(No, that's not my actual key :). And note it's not the full 128 bits... the version of the drivers I have won't permit that, for some reason that I don't understand. But 104 bits is pretty good.)

Anyway, you definitely want to "lock down" your network, unless you are into to providing a public access point. Without encryption, it would be like having a hub on my DSL modem that anybody driving by could plug in to...

--Seen

Maybe the satellite has special shielding or something, but there's enough wired connections down here on the ground that you can probably, for the most part, only use wireless to get a couple miles to the base station/cell tower/802.3 (# correct?) hub.

Thats IEEE 802.11b (aka wavelan) you're thinking about. IEEE 802.3 is Ethernet, IIRC. And what you call a hub is normally refered to as an access point, although they are similar in function. They're not equivalent, though, even if you don't count the wireless part (duh!). Access points usually include a router and nifty features such as NAT and DHCP.

Note also that once you modify it, it's not a Part-15 device any longer and you should have a license.

That's odd: according to the Lucent site (and my Lucent reps) there's no regulation of these antennas. I ran a couple of directional (Yagi) antennas for a 802.11b p2p link test and I asked about FCC requirements.

Hell, they even list the 24 dBi Parabolic Grid as available for 'FCC and unregulated countries only', which leads me to assume they're FCC-legal..

(check out their product site.. Very cool..)

Your Working Boy,

First off, Lucent makes the AirPort for Apple so the RG-1000 and the AirPort are almost exactly the same guts internally. It's not an Aeronet box like "Jay L" said. That being the case, here are some answers to your questions.

1. How does the coverage of the two compare? Are the wireless transmitters essentially the same? (Both seem to use Orinoco Silver cards, though the RG-1000's card isn't removable.)

They're both the same basic board design and use exactly the same WaveLAN Silver card in them. You can remove the card in the RG-1000, it just takes a bit more work. There's a bit of a danger in taking an RG-1000 apart because there's a chance you might break some of the plastic pins that hold the thing together.

2. I've seen the stories about extending coverage by hooking an external antenna to the Apple Airports. Can an external antenna be attached to the RG-1000? If so, with or without hacking?

Neither housing has an antenna extension connector on the outside so you have to do hacking to put a bigger antenna on either one.

3. The Orinoco FAQ says that about 30 clients can be supported by a single RG-1000. Apple's specs suggests 10 clients max. Has anyone used more then 10 clients with an Apple Airport and if so how well did it work?

These are just marketing numbers. I believe that 30 is the absolute max. before you start filling up the airwaves while ten is a good number where you can guarantee a decent connection to all users assuming the all have some rigorous data needs. Lighter use = more concurrent users.

4. Both products can do NAT. Can you configure filters or open up ports with the utilities provided with either?

Neither configurator that comes with either box lets you do cool low level geek-type config of the box, but there are a couple of config packages out there that let you tweak more at the low level. I think the idea was that because it's a consumer product, they try to keep advanced config away from most users.

The bottom line really is that they're both the same board and radio card inside different housings so they're basically the same thing. I think the AirPort 1.2 software load that goes on the box might have some improvements that the current shipping RG-1000 software image doesn't have on them, but I'd keep a look out at the WaveLAN web site to watch for new releases of software for all of Lucent's access point products and cards. Lucent makes some cool stuff and they actually control a lot of the underlying technology so I look for new cool things to be coming from them in the future.

The only downside I see is that Apple seems to be sticking with these goofy IDE cards for their internal card solution where it looks like (from releases by IBM) that the PC manufacturers might be using some sort of smaller mini PCMCIA card. As far as Jay L's list goes, I disagree with all of it except for the antenna issue. I'd like to see Apple and Lucent put a connector on the outside of their residential boxes so we can easily tack on bigger antennae. I had no problems with Lucent support, guess I called a different number than he did. :-)

In Chicago - check out this equipment from Lucent: http://www.wavelan.com/pro ducts/productdetail.html?id=28. I like consume.net's very community-friendly approach to building a network. I'm interested in getting something like that together in Chicago - Not-for-profit, non-hierarchical, and somewhat subversive.

Adelaide Wireless Network

Canberra Wireless Network

Although there isn't anything extremely new in this current story, it's important that the internet is becoming more and more available to EVERYONE. That's what makes the internet so exciting. A hick in the sticks can have just as much power as a corporation by learning a little html. Well that may be pushing it. But the divide is theortectically shrinking, and that is a good thing (TM).

Yes, there are even Linux drivers. They actually support a helluva lot of OS's. The Win2000 drivers work great and the $300 Apple Airport (or the new $300 Orinoco equivalent) are great for small LAN's -- we have one Apple Airport that easily supports 25 Windows PC's.

Now they even have an adapter for *NIX servers or any 10Base-T device that can't use PCMCIA, ISA, or PCI adapters. It just plugs in through any standard 10Base-T interface. Now I can get my SGI server on the WaveLAN! Very cool -- we're going wireless everywhere soon since wiring a building costs about the same as the initial investment in the WaveLAN/Orinoco cards and moving a wireless device requires no expensive re-wiring.

Oh, and regardless of what people tell you about reliability, if we've had approximately 35 total users using Airports without ANY problems for several months, I would say the reliability is very good. BTW, this is as an ethernet hardware access point, not using the internal modem for connection to the internet. As an ethernet hardware access point, both the AirPort and Orinoco are Plug-and-Play out of the box.

E-mail me if you want any details -- we've done a lot of research and work using WaveLAN products including trying to use the 11 mBit wireless building connection hardware.

Yes, there are even Linux drivers. They actually support a helluva lot of OS's. The Win2000 drivers work great and the $300 Apple Airport (or the new $300 Orinoco equivalent) are great for small LAN's -- we have one Apple Airport that easily supports 25 Windows PC's.

Now they even have an adapter for *NIX servers or any 10Base-T device that can't use PCMCIA, ISA, or PCI adapters. It just plugs in through any standard 10Base-T interface. Now I can get my SGI server on the WaveLAN! Very cool -- we're going wireless everywhere soon since wiring a building costs about the same as the initial investment in the WaveLAN/Orinoco cards and moving a wireless device requires no expensive re-wiring.

Oh, and regardless of what people tell you about reliability, if we've had approximately 35 total users using Airports without ANY problems for several months, I would say the reliability is very good. BTW, this is as an ethernet hardware access point, not using the internal modem for connection to the internet. As an ethernet hardware access point, both the AirPort and Orinoco are Plug-and-Play out of the box.

E-mail me if you want any details -- we've done a lot of research and work using WaveLAN products including trying to use the 11 mBit wireless building connection hardware.

Yes, there are even Linux drivers. They actually support a helluva lot of OS's. The Win2000 drivers work great and the $300 Apple Airport (or the new $300 Orinoco equivalent) are great for small LAN's -- we have one Apple Airport that easily supports 25 Windows PC's.

Now they even have an adapter for *NIX servers or any 10Base-T device that can't use PCMCIA, ISA, or PCI adapters. It just plugs in through any standard 10Base-T interface. Now I can get my SGI server on the WaveLAN! Very cool -- we're going wireless everywhere soon since wiring a building costs about the same as the initial investment in the WaveLAN/Orinoco cards and moving a wireless device requires no expensive re-wiring.

Oh, and regardless of what people tell you about reliability, if we've had approximately 35 total users using Airports without ANY problems for several months, I would say the reliability is very good. BTW, this is as an ethernet hardware access point, not using the internal modem for connection to the internet. As an ethernet hardware access point, both the AirPort and Orinoco are Plug-and-Play out of the box.

E-mail me if you want any details -- we've done a lot of research and work using WaveLAN products including trying to use the 11 mBit wireless building connection hardware.

Yes, there are even Linux drivers. They actually support a helluva lot of OS's. The Win2000 drivers work great and the $300 Apple Airport (or the new $300 Orinoco equivalent) are great for small LAN's -- we have one Apple Airport that easily supports 25 Windows PC's.

Now they even have an adapter for *NIX servers or any 10Base-T device that can't use PCMCIA, ISA, or PCI adapters. It just plugs in through any standard 10Base-T interface. Now I can get my SGI server on the WaveLAN! Very cool -- we're going wireless everywhere soon since wiring a building costs about the same as the initial investment in the WaveLAN/Orinoco cards and moving a wireless device requires no expensive re-wiring.

Oh, and regardless of what people tell you about reliability, if we've had approximately 35 total users using Airports without ANY problems for several months, I would say the reliability is very good. BTW, this is as an ethernet hardware access point, not using the internal modem for connection to the internet. As an ethernet hardware access point, both the AirPort and Orinoco are Plug-and-Play out of the box.

E-mail me if you want any details -- we've done a lot of research and work using WaveLAN products including trying to use the 11 mBit wireless building connection hardware.

The wireless networking support isn't really a concern, as these devices will not have native wireless lan support. They simply have a PCMCIA/CardBus port where you could plug in a Wavelan board or something similiar. The S3 linux tablet that Transmeta demo'ed at the Crusoe launch had 802.11b support, this was just done via PCMCIA board.

This maybe slightly offtopic, but this is the best crowd to answer the question.

I want to setup a wireless lan at work with my pc and a handheld. Specifically, I want to use either the Vadem Clio, which is just sooo cool or the Psion 5mx, both of these have pcmcia slots which would accept the lucent wavelan 11Mbps card. Is there any way to setup tcpip between these and my suse box? The options are just endless...Most of my time is spent at work or home and I'd rather have a fast connection than try to use my cell phone...

Sitting in a meeting...playing quake!

This way you don't have to deal with the hassle of WAP or web clipping or whatever it is they call it these days...

Up to 1 W of output power according to the FCC regs for this frequency band FCC (47 CFR) Part 15C, Section 15.247 The relavent code according to the Lucent website for the WaveLAN(Orinoco) cards.

Note the hack described used 1500mW directional to get a 14km range(or 1.5W in case you can't convert this is over the limit stated by the FCC for this frequency band and use).

Interesting that use of this frequency requires frequency hopping, anyone who knows more than me about what this means for interferrence between units?

What's more, the Lucent cards have an external antenna jack on the side of the card. Saves you a little work.

Before ripping a product apart with a dremel tool, check to see that you aren't re-inventing the wheel.

- Some Id10t

Posssibly not (although The Mac crowd has its fair share of hackers, both hardware and software based). What you need to remember, though, is that AirPort technology is 802.11-based. This means that the technology should work for other wireless cards, including Lucent's WaveLan cards.

As an answer to a previous post, the original article menations that the author found that the hack was legal in New Zealand (where he is based), and believes that the same requirements go in the States, as well.

Leave it to the FCC, though, to find a way to make it illegal.

What I would really like to see is affordable WaveLan/Airport-like Internet access sold like cell phone access. ("For $19.95/month - unlimited dial-up. For $29.95/month, unlimited wireless access. For $29.95/month - unlimited cell phone access.")

I suppose that will happen the day that xDSL-like technologies are actually affordable.

we seem to have a lot of wireless networking posts here and it finally got to me; I have an athlon 850 sitting around (finally got to tell somebody!!) here in the midwest (stl) and ran into all these different problems:

a. it is not cheap
let me repeat, it is not cheap

there are two basic options for a hobby lan the WaveLan cards or the WebGear Airport cards. The base stations for the wavelan are $600+ and those for the webgear are $500+

b. HUGE tradeoffs all over the place.
wavelan is fast at 11Mbps, webgear only 2
wavelan cards are $180/ea, webgear gives you 2 for $199
you can use an airport instead of the wavelan access point, but that has configuration problems. You need a mac to configure stuff etc. I don't think I know anybody who uses a mac.

c. no local electronic stores carry them
even good ol' compusa stopped carrying the webgear cards. (i called)
If I am going to spend this kind of money, it will *have* to be an impulse buy at a store!!

d. can't find webgear cards anywhere online!

the only thing you really want to get is not in stock anywhere on the web!! Everybody posts about bargain buys (2/$99 etc) but where are they????

we could do all kinds of fun things with cheaper wireless lans, I live in a univ-student area and we could have all kinds of cool hacks if these things were cheaper...

this is when I wish most that we had a mercata style group for slashdotters...if apple can sell $99 wireless cards, why can't anybody else???

(posts with links get moderated up...
hmmm... lets throw in some links@!!)

get this!

We've done this here at the office (used the Lucent cards with the WaveLAN) and it works great. You may need to use a Mac to configure the base station the way you want it -- it uses SNMP though so other software should be usable. The author mentions that the Karlbridge software for Windows does everything right. Else you can figure out what its default IP address is and use that (it's listed in the documentation somewhere, or maybe on http://til.info.apple.com/). Or get friendly with someone who owns a PowerBook... or bring the base station with you to some sort of public computing facility that has Macs on ethernet and use the Airport Admin Utility which is a free download from Apple's web site (you don't have to install the AirPort software; you can just unpack the archive and there is a copy of the admin utility there that you can run).

It seems that in the simplest configuration you do not need either the Gateway or the Access thing. Read here for some info, along with a link to a pretty large PDF which is the user manual for the WaveLan PCI card.

Hotnutz.com - Funny

It requires a Mac running MacOS 8.6 or higher to initially configure the Airport Basestation, but since I set it to run in bridging mode on startup it has run perfectly without a Mac around.

At this time, this was the cheapest way to get the Lucent cards on a bridged solution as neither the Lucent nor GPL driver can currently run the card in promiscuous mode (necessary for the kernel bridging code).

Specifications do not mention Linux support. Several other OSes are listed...although one is "Novel" and the "Windows CE" product no longer uses that name.

Check out wavelan for resellers and more info

How much are they for the different speeds?

I bought a silver (11 Mbs) PCMCIA card (medium security 40 bit? encryption) for $170

Do you need 1 card and a port? How much is that?

Im not sure how much their access points are but I got an Apple Airport (uses wavelan silver technology) for $299. It has ethernet and phone jacks and serves as a simple router with NAT and port mapping

Can you get by with 2 pc cards, 1 in a non-mobile laptop attached to a ground line?

Yes but not properly on Apples yet, Apple claims they will soon release an airport software base station. I guess they are waiting for people to buy up all the airports before they release the software to turn any mobile with a card into a basestation. You can currently do computer to computer with apples now but not with DHCP and NAT. I think the software is avail for wintel and linux to turn any card into a router but I'm not completely sure

What is the range?

~150 foot sphere through typical housing construction, further through air.

Proxim:
One of the engineers at Proxim maintains a mailing list for running RangeLAN2 and symphony radios under linux. It gets a fair amount of traffic, and updates are posted fairly often.
You can download the driver at:
Lucent:
http://www.komacke.com/distribution.html

There is a stripped down version of Lucent's WaveLAN driver code which is used by the WaveLAN driver for Linux. You can find this one at:
http://www.wavelan.com/support/s oftware/index.html

There is also a Linux driver for the Aironet radios which can be found at: ftp://sourceforge.org/pcmcia/contrib/

My personal opinion is that the Aironet driver is kind of nice, since it is small and efficient (neither the Lucent nor the Proxim drivers are), and since Aironet has an 11Mb radio, is compatible at least with Lucent's Access Points (and should be with other 802.11 radios), Aironet is nice if you want speed under linux. Unfortunately, I am not sure whether Aironet supports WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) or not yet, and I know the Linux driver doesn't yet, so if you are interested in Security, I would recommend the Lucent Radio.


Obligatory Note: This is my personal opinion, and should not be construed as the opinion of any other entity.

Here at work, we recently (two weeks ago) implemented a four-block wireless shot direct from our main office, and it works like a charm. We used two Linux machines as the routers, with the PCMCIA-cs modules loaded along with the "wlan2" module which is available from Lucent here. The WaveLAN "silver" 2.4mbit cards were used on an ISA-PCMCIA bridge.

We got a professional communications company to run up antennas on towers on both sides of the shot, and it's great, no problems at all. We commonly get 5ms roundtrip times, and can push well over 1.6mbit (200Kb/sec), 0% packet loss, and the weather makes no difference from what we can see (and we've been through some heavy snowfall and rain already). As for the technical setup, in all honesty, any competent sysadmin should be able to set up such a connection in a snap -- it's that easy.

If it's a long outdoor wireless shot (as opposed to wireless for an indoors network only), you might be able to go out and climb onto a tower and do it on your own, but there are companies which exist to do that (antenna installation, pointing, etc) already. Then again, if you're trying to save cash, and want to hook up your friend a block or two away into your cable (or *DSL) connection via masq or whatever, then I suppose you could do that :)

However, it's not like this stuff is cheap, the cards are commonly $200cdn or so, with the antennas being just as much. Low-loss cable for the antenna is expensive, too. There are a lot of things to factor in, but all in all, it's all pretty cool stuff :)

It's great to see more and more companies supporting wireless on Linux, though, as it means not only will we get more robust drivers, but installation will be easier, and support will be broader. Of course, it should be obvious that anyone using wireless for the same thing we did (i.e. linking up two networks across a few blocks, or even kilometers away), they'll be using anything but Win* to do the routing work for the greatest amount of stability.

I have worked with wireless, I have used the Breezecom, Lucent WaveLAN, and Solectek Corp. wireless, and I am happy with the results, in so far as a solution for a remote site, but when you are dealing with 900 mhz, the licensed MMDS band (2.500 to 2.690 GHz), or unlicensed U-NII band (5.725 to 5.825 GHz). You have to realize that those are all microwave, or in the case of the 900mhz almost microwave frequencies. Now I may be paranoid but a microwave has heavy layers of sheilding that stop the propagation of radiation, but these things have antennas that help propogate radiation and you stick a card in your laptop and set it on your lap. I don't know. It's just to creapy for me, also the latency of microwave wireless over a relitivly short distance is far to much to get any good voice over ip, or do anything that is time sensitive, I.E. q3 and such. It's a good choice for some instances, like browsing the net, chatting, or e-mail, but don't think it can give you everything that your lan can.

Go here: http://www.wavelan.com/news/news.html?i d=76 to find out about the future.

The future is not bluetooth.

In the white paper on the WaveLan site they mention that Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh is actually implementing a WaveLan system across their campus. I'd talk to them before you do anything. Anyone from CMU's IT department care to comment?

WaveLan white paper

Aetius

see

this page for possible linux soutions

The High Speed Option gives 3 times more effective throughput as the Standard Speed option. Standard Speed and Standard Low Speed are the equivalent to the throughput offered by the WaveLAN IEEE radio.

Folks, this is simply Lucent's WaveLAN product, which has been working with Linux for quite a while. I've been using it at home for 3 years. (Used to work at ATT... Old demo equipment headed for the scrap heap... No way would I have picked it up at List Price.) As for getting the ISA card to work, if you look at the WaveLAN pages, you'll notice that they have gone to a PCMCIA ISA card, with a PCMCIA WaveLAN adapter plugged into it. Card Services should handle this like any other PCMCIA device. To be certain, just add a genuine PC Card controller to your PC, and just buy the PC Card version of the product.

This is great technology, and at $300 for a hub and $100 for a card for an iBook, its damn cheap too. This isn't *new* exactly, the IEEE 802.11 standard has been out for a while, but not this cheap, or this fast. I really hope Apple will give this cool tech a kick start into the home market.
The iBook has a built in antenna, to make this work with a PC or a G3 PowerBook, its going to require an external antena, which doesn't appear to be on the card Apple is selling for the iBook. Here is a card that does have it. As well as some cards for desktops (ISA, yuck :-(, at sub 10mbps speeds it doesn't matter I guess) The FAQ says that 11mbps will be available *soon*, I guess that means now, because Apple is releasing theirs, the web page is just not quite up to date.
I imagine that it wouldn't be *too* difficult for someone to hack up a driver for Linux, especially if its for the ISA card Lucent offers, for those of you who want to network their home without running wires. At $300 for a 10 user hub, its probably cheaper then running wires, unless you REALLY enjoy that sort of thing.

Spyky