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Lucent to Offer Cheap Wavelan Cards

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i've-got-no-wires-to-hold-me-down dept.

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.

3 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Re:802.11 by dattaway · · Score: 5

    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! :)

  2. 802.11 implementation by pouwelse · · Score: 5
    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.

  3. Re:Health Side Effects???? by mindstrm · · Score: 5

    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.