Lucent to Offer Cheap Wavelan Cards

Glarvat the Hepcat writes, "Lucent is preparing to sell new 11 Mbps cards at costs to rival some of the 2 Mbps cards such as WebGear. They also are supposed to be also to handle distances of up to 1500 feet. Released to select retailers by late March. " Recently we ordered a few Lucent cards at the Geek Compound to test them out. The impressive thing about these things is that Wavelan has Linux drivers: Source code and all. How many vendors have tarballs on their sites? The hardware gateways are fairly expensive, but simply setting them up peer to peer and using IP Masqing works pretty well. I haven't tested the range but they quite quick.

Comments

already using them in Linux routers

[Garfunkel]

We just setup a wirless network to connect some of the small group housing here at the College. We're using the Lucent WaveLan Turbo Silver 11Mbs cards in P100 linux routers and they work great! It was a relatively quick and easy setup, I just wish I could figure out how to get mrouted (multicast routing) working so the students can log into the Netware servers. Anyone have any ideas (the HOWTOs are no help so don't point me there)?

As a side note, I will be getting one of these nice 11 meg links to my house shortly. :) And you guys thought DSL was nice, heh!

Lucent driver is *not* a source driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately the Lucent drivers are binary only.

The "source" tarball contains a skeleton C code which links against a binary module to do the actual work.

So, you get all the great disadvantages of binary drivers: x86 only, no support for Linux 2.3 or BSD, etc, etc...

The older generation of WaveLan cards have been supported by a truly open source driver for years now

Re:802.11

[dattaway]

Here's how to add a highly directional antenna to a wireless card with no antenna jack, specifically a zoomair card. I have three of them and did this to two of them. Line of sight goes for miles! :)

802.11 implementation

[pouwelse]

The Wavelan is only one of the implementations of the IEEE802.11 standard and will probably drop further in price. The competition is picking up. Harris annouced a price of $14 for the components of an 11MBps wireless LAN card...

Here at our university we measured the range of the Wavelan produkts years ago. This new 11 Mbps still won't cover more then 40 Meters inside a building. Solid walls cannot be penetrated with the signal strength of only 100mW@2.4GHz . When the WaveLANs are used outdoors, the range is increased to 500 meters or more provided there is line of sight. We also tested that a small FM signal can block all the communication of the supposed robust CDMA radio.

Probably the big break will come from bluetooth this standard is technically superiour to the IEEE commity design. It is cheap enough to be build into laptops, PDAs, mp3 players, etc.

The Linux driver for the WaveLAN cards are only partly distributed in source code. A binairy exists in the distribution to talk to their MAC chip. They will not disclose the interface to they propierary chipset...

Just my 5 eurocents...
Johan.

Re:Health Side Effects????

[dattaway]

Considering your microwave oven is 1000 to 2000 watts and your wireless network card is a wimpy 100mW, good luck at getting it to heat a cup of coffee or your brain.

This screams for wire-level crypto

[Overfiend]

With the proliferation of wireless devices like this, it seems to be more important than ever to make sure that we aren't sending unencrypted packets between machines.

Does the 802.11 spec cover this, or is it just a connectivity protocol for wireless devices (I assume the latter)?

900 MHz cordless phones have made claims to some sort of encryption for years, but I don't take what they put on the box at face value -- I suspect it's pretty weak stuff.

Can somebody provide some pointers to IP-level cryptography? I'll be wanting to go with an in-home set up like this in the near future but I really chafe at the idea of how trivially easy it would be for people to sniff my packets. I realize that encryption is easily built into higher-level protocols, but I really like the idea of minimum disclosure to eavesdroppers, particularly for signals that otherwise wouldn't even leave my home (not everything is outbound to the ISP, you know).

Open source driver here:

[Booker]

this page has the open source driver, and it's still being actively developed.

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Basestation/gateway does more then you think!

[stripes]

The hardware gateways are fairly expensive, but simply setting them up peer to peer and using IP Masqing works pretty well.

That will work, but "ad hoc" mode (which is the "no base station" mode) misses out on a few things you get when you have the access-point/basestation thing.

• The access-point can hold packets for systems that have going into low-power mode, and only turn on the reciever once every few seconds. This allows greatly reduced battery use (like less then 5% of normal use!) when you arn't doing much with the network. The low-power mode is not used in "ad hoc" mode because you might never get your messages! The low-power mode can be used anytime you have nothing to transmit, and havn't recieved anything for a second or two, so between clicks on a web page you can be saving power.
• The access-point can arange to use a RTS/CTS protocall where it tells everyone who gets the "wire" for the next thousand or so bit-times, which greatly reduces the hidden tranmitter* problem, and increses the effectave range (and the bandwidth at longer ranges).
• Some funky things also can be done with multiple access points, but I'm not quite sure what they are. I think they end up just being able to bridge together multiple wireless nets, which isn't a big deal if you are ok with changing your IP address when you roam from one net to another. This is probbably a non-issue in a normal sized house, but could be a big deal in a reasonable sized office building (we need two access points per floor).

So if you are using unpluged laptops, a base station will can increse your battery life. If you have problems getting the range you want a base station can help that too.



* The hidden transmitter is where you have, say, three machines, A, B, and C. A can hear B but not C, C and hear B but not A, and B can hear both. If A and C both talk they don't hear each other, so they won't do the ehternet I-heard-a-collision-while-I-was-talking-so-I'll-ba ck-off thing. B will hear both messages, but they will damage each other, so all B will realy hear is a really long collison. With an access point (either where B is, or close by) it will mediate A and C's demands to talk. The RTS (request to send) is a ver short message so the chances of collisons when sending them is quite low. There is a slight increse in latency this way.

Re:Health Side Effects????

[mindstrm]

Well. That's a tough one. Scientifically, how do you prove that something is harmless?

Here's a few facts though.
2.4Ghz is not ionizing radiation. It can't break down molecular bonds. (This is the chief cause of damage from higher-energy radiation, UV and up...)

2.4Ghz is the frequency (well.. 2.45) that most microwaves ovens run at. They don't mutate your food.. they just warm it up. (Really, that's all they do.. warm it up by vibrating polarized molecules.. chiefly water)

These network cards use in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 milliwats of power. Your cellphone probably uses about 10 times that. Your microwave only cooks things because it uses 6000 times that (600 watts)

If you turned your microwave on, with the door open (if you could) and stood there.. or if you just had a leak,the only thing that would happen is you would heat up. it wouldn't mutate your DNA, it would just increase your body temperature. Granted, if this happened rapidly, or in a focused area, it could be dangerous.... but that's all it does.

And the proof is in society. So far,there really aren't any problems.