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...
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
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...
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.
Maybe what you really needed was a heating solution, not a networking one.
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
The PCI cards are always PCI to PCMCIA adapters. You can just pick up a nicely supported linux one off eBay that uses ISA and features two PCMCIA slots in an 3.5" drive slot for $24 + $8 shipping (or you could wait and bid on the other auctions but this guy is selling a couple hundred of them at that price buy it now so...). I'm waiting for mine to get here after failing to get the DWL-650 PCI to PCMCIA card to work (almost there, not quite). Here is the eBay link for more details:
/proc/pci information for the card is:
here
I have nothinhg to do with that auction besides having brought two of them. I'm not 100% positive they have linux support but I'm pretty sure they do... I'll be finding out later this week when they arrive.
Downsides: ISA slot
Upsides: ISA slot, two PCMCIA slots in an easy to access form of a 3.5" drive face (think pcmciacompact flash adapter for digital cameras - cheap at $10), should work just fine with linux.
If anyone has any tips on the DWL-650 card please do share them! The
"CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c475 (rev 128)."
When I insert the Dell/Orinoco wireless adapter it shows up but the drivers don't seem to detect it in the PCI card..
... 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 :-)
>...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
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.