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.
All of 20 feet is going to be real useful!
Also, the 2x mode is proprietary so you won't be able to mix with other vendors cards.
But it's a good start.
Does it work with NetStumbler?
I'm sure this is good for somebody but my 11mb wireless lan is already 11 times faster than my net connection. Locally, I rarely every transfer large files between machines.
It seems to be that good 'ol 802.11b is still the price/performance leader. And with a range of only 20 feet, I can't see much use for 802.11a in my house.
Maybe when cards that support both 802.11a and 802.11b are cheap enough I'll start buying those. That's what it took for 100 mbs lans to take over, that's probably what it will take for 54 mbs wlan to take over the marketplace.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Dunno about Linux drivers
:-)
Well, Proxim did a good set of (albeit binary-only) drivers for Linux, which work swell under 2.4 or later - I should know, I'm using one right now
Seriously, I'd expect that Proxim will either release a driver for this soon, or it will be covered under existing ones.
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 ?
I just bring my DirectTV dish with me on my head... world without wires.. j/j
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
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.
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.
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...
MS PPTP and Cisco's VPN 3000 and 5000 client can log in at the same time as the regular login. And, even the older Cisco client can log in automatically once the "target" network is contacted. The user never has to know.
Just for my own personal knowledge, what is the contention "breaking point" for a wereless lan, and is it any differnet than a regualr ethernet LAN, also a shared medium.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
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
Shared with your neighbors, their microwave oven, their cordless phones. "Shared" in the 802.11 wireless sense is a lot different from "shared collision domain".
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Anyone?
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
This is not a product for the home LAN - the range is far too limited. You'd require some kind of repeater in every room.
Fortunately, the main use for wireless in home LANs is to share Internet access. Since mine is capped at 1.5 Mbps, it doesn't matter that 802.11b only runs at roughly twice that. (I know it's rated at 11 Mbps, but true throughput is far less.)
Digital video over wireless will just have to wait.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball...
It doesn't look like it does. The two sandards are on different bands (2.4G vs. 5 G), and the spec sheet says the radio only works in the 5.15 GHz to 5.35 GHz range. It'll be a while before the infrastructure is built up and will also be especially slow until dual-band base stations become available/cheap.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Right now they're only offering the wireless access point and a cardbus card. If you don't have a PCMCIA slot or your laptop doesn't support cardbus, you're boned.
::ahem:: non-pirated / non-porn movies from your computer on your couch!
I assume they'll bring out PCI cards any day now, but it's interesting to do a product launch w/o supporting desktop computers at all!
This should be enough bandwidth to stream videos without jerks... imagine putting a computer with TV out in your living room and watching all of your
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
Given similar power and antenna size, 802.11a range is about the same at 802.11b.
Seems to me that this is going to do for the price of existing 802.11b hardware what 100Mbps hardware did to the price of existing 10Mbps hardware.
This is great, because 802.11b is easily fast enough for most home broadband. The $19.99 802.11b card was already on the way, this will make it show up faster.
Remember VPN isn't free! You either have to pay for a hardware solution or take a performance hit on all connected boxes for all the encryption.
I've been using a proxim wireless lan for quite some time albiet the 1.5mbps. I've been reasonably happy with the range and okay with the performance (who cares if you get >1.5 if you're just sharing cable internet). However, I must say the driver support is a weakness. The drivers are maintained by a third party whose site is not always up. Apparantly the guy had to pay for the privilege. (http://www.komacke.com/distribution.html). So while I'm happy with it for the cost and what it does (especially considering its > 2 years old), I think I'll be looking for more standard stuff when I upgrade.
As for range on this: I can go upstairs but it only works on half of the upstairs. I can generally travel downstairs anywhere I want. The laptop version has a shorter range unless you replace the silly nub antenna.
I still thing wireless has a bit of a ways to go (especially the cheap stuff) mostly in the area of range and price before it replaces good ol wire.
Maybe what you really needed was a heating solution, not a networking one.
If everyone was obsessive about checking /. in the morning, things might have been different.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I believe Enterasys Networks (formerly Cabletron Systems) RoamAbout R2 Wireless was the first wireless access platform that offered 54 Megabits per second (Mbps) performance based on the 802.11a standard (w/advanced Layer 3-4 capabilities)
http://www.enterasys.com/roamabout/
And yes support for linux is there...
I've seen demo's with a Compaq IPAQ running Linux using these wireless cards
With such a short range, a VERY limited product line (where is the desktop hardware?!), and a 2x mode that is proprietary, is anyone really going to jump on these just yet?
I know I'm certainly not switching--this just isn't good enough to replace Cat5 yet. Plus the price is too high and the range is too low to attract consumers away from 802.11b. I'm going to hold off until there is a much larger selection of products by more than one company before I even think about 802.11a.
There's several cracks of it out and about. Combine it with NetStumbler or something similar and you've got a security issue- sweeps won't get you anywhere unless you're lucky enough to be doing the assessment when the SOB that's breaking into your net is there at the time. Unfortunately, almost everyone can't afford an audit of their net and those that can really pretty much can only afford it about once a month.
This is not to say that 802.11(b) is not useful- far, far from it. This is analogous to having a car with or without airbags. Would you drive a car without airbags? Most people will say "sure" or at least "maybe" because a car's too useful in and of itself with or without that extra level of security. Same goes for 802.11(b).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
> Experience 100 Mbps wireless networking in your
> conference room, classroom, or office
Why do they show a model lying on a couch with a wireless laptop?
While engineers pummel the hell out of the wireless handheld market trying to save their jobs their marketing has become a bit paranoid.
... now that I've finished wiring my house -- convincing myself all the while that all my effort was worth the extra bandwidth...
Well, at least now I have a whole new relationship with my attic and with the spiders in the cellar that wireless would have never permitted.
Wireless is going to cause a revolution in our societies, geeks will start to mingle with normal people in the living rooms, and our world will change forever :-)
Because I work for an HMO and sometimes I have to work at home. That's why.
(While I don't have any access to medical data, or personal records, I feel that broadcasting out any information, even if it is encrypted, is just asking for it. I've seen too many news reports on How Easy It Is To Crack a wireless connection for me to feel safe with one. And yes, I do know what I'm doing).
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
>...eight-oh-two-dot-eleven-eh...
For those among us who don't speak Canadian (and by the way, it's "eight-oh-two-dot-eleven, eh?") this is "eight-oh-two-dot-eleven-ay".
Always glad to help.
Virg
What are the radiation levels of 802.11a and 802.11b compared to common household appliances?
I use my laptop 10 hours per day and I'm not sure I want my brain bombarded with energy all that time.
Dejan
www.jelovic.com
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.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
Generally speaking, the higher the frequency, the lower the traffic. The highest frequency services in wide-area local use are in the 2.7 GHz band (for Sprint's wireless broadband service), 1.9GHz (for digital cellphones) and around 1.8 GHz (for DBS/DSS services).
;)
The wavelength of a 5 GHz signal is a little less than half that of a 2.4 GHz signal; at the low power we're talking about for 802.11x signals (less than a tenth of a watt peak emitted power), a 2.4 antenna should work with a 5 source.
It also means that it is more subject to physical interference, and that bullhorn antennas are now an option
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
802.11 is 2/1 Mbps
802.11b is 11/5.5/2/1 Mbps
802.11a is 54/48/36/24/18/12/9/6 Mbps
If they use the Intsil (sp?) PRISM chipset or something compatible enough, perhaps the drivers from the Linux WLAN project may work.
If not, I bet Mark's planning to make 'em work.