Slashdot Mirror
54 Mbps/100 Mbps Wireless LAN
carbon60 writes: "Proxim seems to have very quietly released 802.11a based products. 54 Mbps in standard mode and 100 Mbps in "2X" mode. The main website lists the products." They're a little more expensive, and I dunno about Linux drivers, but still, that's some fast wireless action.
Acording to this article on 80211 planet You should be able to get 3x the speed at the same distance you get from an 802.11b card.
This uses a 5 Ghz piece of spectrum. The antennas can be smaller or have more gain for their size, which would enhance range. This would be great as a point-to-point link with highly directional, high gain antennas (like a 12 element yagi or something).
In such a short time, we've gone from the days where 80m long radio waves were considered "shortwave" and anything over 100 Mhz was "unusable" to our new modern dreams of Multi Ghz signals and waves getting so short that we are tempted to measure them in millimeters. Lo! What brave new world is this?
The great thing about really, really tiny waves is the antenna size. While nobody would want to venture the project of making a 24dbi parabolic dish for use with AM radio signals at 500kHz, $80 will get one to your doorstep ready for 2.4Ghz. Now that we are in the upper 5Ghz range, it will finally be feasible to build a mega-super dish where the actual radiated power is in the mega-super-ka-jigga-trilla-watt range. Maybe we could get rid of that whole line of sight problem with Moonbounce communications. Of course the ping time would be seriously worse than the average satellite... The "big sattelite" is just a little outside of geosync orbit..
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
I was about to ask 'Whut in da heck is NetStumbler' but instead I got off my butt and
found out for myself:
Network administrators deploying an 802.11b wireless network need site survey tools to help plan locations for access points. Once installed, the access points need to be checked periodically to ensure they are providing adequate coverage.
Some wireless network cards provide reasonable survey tools, but the freeware Network Stumbler is far superior to most. The program captures signal strength and signal-to-noise statistics, but perhaps more important, it helps network administrators identify and locate rogue access points--those that employees may have installed without central IT's permission--as well as determine whether or not WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is being used, to help prevent potential security breaches.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
802.11a was set as a standard, but, until now, no company has made it economical enough to produce the hardware. I don't think it will "catch on" until there's at least one more company making these cards, and driving down the price a bit.
Does it work with NetStumbler?
Yes. 801.11b and 802.11a are physical layer protocols. Toms hardware has more details, but basically they operate in different frequency bands but once you get to link layer the differences begin to dissolve. by the time you get to network layer, it's the same protocol. which means it has all the same security holes outlined by the recent paper on the subject and exploitable by airsnort.
So yes, you can use NetStumbler to steal more bandwidth now. Whether or not someone will figure out how to solve the solved problem of mutual authentication for the wireless community remains to be seen.
Read the press release and post your comment, eh?
802.11a runs up to about 150 feet indoors *at full speed* where 802.11b can run more like 300 feet. (These are just random numbers, of course, because internal obstacles like plaster coated chicken wire stops transmissions.)
But 802.11a has a number of step down speeds: if it can't do 54 Mbps, it drops to the next, and so on. I believe it has 12 stepdowns to 802.11b's 4 (1, 2, 5.5, 11).
This means that where 802.11b might be able to run at 1 Mbps at a few hundred feet from an access point, 802.11a could still be running at 12 Mbps.
Further, when you get out into the open landscape and can do point-to-point, you can run miles and miles, just as with 802.11b. Or, with an access point mounted externally for a neighborhood or campus.
And 802.11a uses the 5 GHz band, which is uncrowded and reserved, unlike 2.4 GHz (Bluetooth, HomeRF, cordless phone, microwave oven interference).
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
This is completely false. The range of 802.11a at full rate (54 Mbps) is quite short, yes. But, 802.11a can achieve 11 Mbps at longer range than 802.11b, and it can reach 1 Mbps at quite long range. Thus it is correct to say that 802.11a actually has better range than 802.11b.