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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.
Is anyone else out there sick of talking about 802.11b ( and 802.11a ) ?
It talks way too long to say. It needs a better name. In an interesting section on the wireless internet at The Economist they suggest the name Wi-Fi, which stands for Wireless fidelity or some such silliness. How do people feel about this? Personally as silly as the definition seems to be it seems better than talking of 802.11b. Also, is anyone using this name ?
Does anyone know what the channel seperation is on the 5 GHz band? On the 2.4 GHz band, you can combine channels 1, 6, and 11 (since they require 5 channels of seperation) with three wavelan adapters and a combiner/decombiner on each end of a point-to-point link. At 2.4 GHz, you can max out at 33 Mbps/sec by doing this - at 5 GHz, combining two channels would get you 108 Mbps - or more if there are more channels to work with.
The thing I'm interested in is whether these can step down and work with existing 802.11b hardware, similar to what 100bt cards do on a 10bt network.
I'd guess no, and that will hurt things somewhat. 802.11b has a reasonable home following, and I don't see a lot of users upgrading their home networks to 'a', because they don't need the additional bandwidth in most cases. (If I want video, it's probably going to be on a stationary device I can run a cable to). A lot of corps may implement 'b' because of the extra range and bandwidth, so your laptop would need two cards in it... which would suck.