Intel's 802.11A Wireless: 5x Faster

Jaben writes: "Intel today released the first 802.11A wireless LAN devices which offer more than a fivefold increase in speed over the current 802.11B. as soon as more devices get onto the market this new technology will really make wireless a possible alternative instead of a neat item to play with."

Comments

COST!!!

[clinko]

I keep saying it, if one company would make this cheap it wouldn't be just a toy. Cost is the main problem with wireless, and why I haven't adopted it.

*YET*

:)

Re:COST!!!

[cmowire]

On the other hand, 802.11a is not that much more expensive than 802.11b.

And you can use the gigahertz cordless phones and microwaves without worying about it messing with your wireless connectivity, even though you mostly just have to wory about the gigahertz phones.

Which means that I have another few months to wait, so that I don't get the early-adopter tax on the 802.11a units, before I go out and see about picking up Wireless Ethernet kit. ;)

Re:COST!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost is NOT the main problem with wireless, esp. wireless networking. A $200 one time cost for the access point with $100 NICs is nothing for a lot of networks.

Don't talk about Joe Public--he don't care about no stinkin wireless even if it was cheap. It's the folks that want to play with the stuff that are all excited by it.

The main problem? It's the line of sight requirement, or, to put it another way, the limited area of coverage.

I'd love to set up cells of networks with friends in the neighborhood, but the few hundred feet limitation sucks. And if I want to direct it to a friend's tower or another location, I need line of site, which is not common in surburbia or even many rural locations between two networks who want to hook up.

Solve those issues, and I would have been an adopter. My neighborhood is entirely DLC'd. No DSL. No cable modem. Satellite--well, bleh. Meanwhile, I have 2 T1 equivalent connections 1.5 miles away. Hell, they're even on a hill. But it's on the crest on the wrong side to where they need to go. Zoning laws prevent towers of the height necessary (and it be damn ugly if it was allowed.)

I would have been a long-time adopter of wireless products. Everyone in my neighborhood would be as well. I could set up VPNs with adjacent neighborhoods. Use cell technology to bypass providers. But the thing is, the range is fine if you focus and direct the antennae, but with too many common interruptions, like trees, roads, hills, squirrels, you get big problems.

I'm still waiting on Cisco's VOFDM or whatever that was on /. a while back that did not require line of site. Unfortunately, when I read the info that was available back then, it sounded like it was targetted at ISPs and businesses, not the home market.

Solve the line of site issue and you'd get big adoption, since you can then bypass providers almost regardless of the characteristics of the land that you live on (well, unless you live on the side of a mountain).

Re:COST!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No no no... The 802.11a is $449 for the access point, $229 for a pci card, and $179 for the notebook card, and since that's what this story is about, well...

now, 802.11b, I have no idea...

Re:COST!!!

[funky womble]

There's some near-line-of-sight kit available, most is for large ISP systems (Cisco and others), I think Wi-Lan have something a bit smaller that's near-LoS (though it's still quite a lot more than 802.11b pricing..) If you need to be totally non-line-of-sight you'll have to drop the speed *right* down (and probably need an amateur radio license too).

Re:COST!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, 11mbps is just too slow for the average user... Ass.

Re:COST!!!

[thetechweenie]

"I keep saying it, if one company would make this cheap it wouldn't be just a toy. Cost is the main problem with wireless, and why I haven't adopted it. "

Well, 802.11b stuff from Linksys is DIRT cheap right now at Staples. Their AP's with the built in DSL/Cable router are $100.00 cheaper than last month! I'm buying as many as possible. I'm posting right now, using my ap, and I must say I love it, worth every penny! Besides, there's nothing like reading /. while on the can. ;)

Re:COST!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are list prices. Try $340 for the access point and $130 for the card. Available now. And these prices are about where the 2.4 ghz equipment came out at.

5x more secure?

[DaveBarr]

When are we going to get a technology that's 5x more secure?

Re:5x more secure?

[imrdkl]

Secure? Dont you know? We can make every 802.11 to be public access now. It's all about being neighborly, and using a cool perl script to manage your firewall dynamically.

Letting everyone in to your house makes them less likely to steal.

Re:5x more secure?

[hebertpa]

they have a product that is 5x more secure its called cat 5

Re:5x more secure?

[MikeyLikesIt!]

When are we going to get a technology that's 5x more secure?

The trick is to know your technology - if you want security, use a secure medium!

Even if your physical layer is insecure (which will invariably be the case with this sort of technology), you can always implement security at higher layers. Don't want someone to know you're transmitting pr0n? Then encrypt it at both ends at the transport layer (ever heard of https??).

Please, someone enlighten me as to why, exactly, 802.11 in itself has to be secure!

Re:5x more secure?

[cymen]

IPSec. Why waste your time with anything else? I really want a guide for getting Linux with FreeSwan to talk to FreeBSDs IPSec (using racoon?). There are a number of guides to getting IPSec working on Windows 2000, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc... Here are a few links:


How to setup IPsec interoperable for Linux, OpenBSD and PGPNet
Replacing WEP With IPsec

Why does IPSec with Linux seem like such a hack? FreeSwan is pretty annoying - why don't they just get IPSec into the kernel and go from there? Instead there appears to be a megapatch. It just makes me nervous. It's probably ok but man... Also, while I'm bitching, IPSec is a bit of a pain - or at least the implementations are. It doesn't need to be this complicated.

Re:5x more secure?

[Mike McTernan]

Then encrypt it at both ends at the transport layer (ever heard of https??). Oh, and to do the encryption on servers makes it a bit harder to scale them - since most news sites

Fine if you own the servers and can get them to use https... but if you don't?

Please, someone enlighten me as to why, exactly, 802.11 in itself has to be secure!

It doesn't have to be secure (think IPsec), but I'm sure that everyone can see major benfits of making a technology that openly broadcasts data more secure.

Re:5x more secure?

[DaveBarr]

Please, someone enlighten me as to why, exactly, 802.11 in itself has to be secure!

Because 802.11 becomes incredibly useless if you can't trust it. This sounds like you're questioning the need for security at all. If you are, then there's nothing I can say to convice you why a secure wireless medium is needed.

Re:5x more secure?

[DaveBarr]

IPSec. Why waste your time with anything else?

• Because Joe Home User has no hope of being able to set up and use IPsec securely anytime soon
• Because IPsec does almost nothing to help protect your system or network from attack. (so what you have no cleartext data for someone to sniff? Someone can still hack your lan and your system)
• Because there's an immense installed base of devices and systems with no IPsec support
• Because there's more to the world than IP

Joe Home user shouldn't have to be a network security export in order to use wireless technology safely. We need technologies that you can turn on and are safe out of the box. Has years of unsecure crap out of the box from Microsoft so warped our sense of reality and truth?

Re:5x more secure?

[ftobin]

Because 802.11 becomes incredibly useless if you can't trust it. This sounds like you're questioning the need for security at all. If you are, then there's nothing I can say to convice you why a secure wireless medium is needed.

No, the original poster nailed it on the head. There is no real reason that wireless needs to be 'secure', just like email doesn't need to be 'secure'. It's the higher-level protocols, namely IPsec and OpenPGP that can be implemented on top of wireless and email that implement the security for us. Wireless security is about interface-to-interface security; this is precisely what IPsec solves.

Re:5x more secure?

[cymen]

Because Joe Home User has no hope of being able to set up and use IPsec securely anytime soon

Good point. But...

Because IPsec does almost nothing to help protect your system or network from attack. (so what you have no cleartext data for someone to sniff? Someone can still hack your lan and your system)

How exactly are they going to be hacking the LAN? Grabbing IP addresses? That can be fixed... Nothing will be 100% but at least it'll be much much better than it is now.

Because there's an immense installed base of devices and systems with no IPsec support

Sure is... But...

Because there's more to the world than IP

No there isn't. Least not anything that I care about... But seriously - what other protocols do you think are important today?

Of course Joe Home User is going to be screwed but IPSec can be simplified extensively it shouldn't be a problem. The devices that don't support IPSec are almost worthless to Joe Home User so just toss 'em. Have an Ad-Hoc network using IPSec with Windows and they should be fine. Sure people without any brains or interest will have problems but what else is new? If they get hacked and their data is important they'll pay someone to fix it.

As I understand it IPSec can solve most of the security problems. Sure it would be nice if the specs were updated for 802.11b and new firmware was released to fix this security prolems but *RIGHT NOW* there isn't anything else. What are *YOU* going to do right now to stop people from sniffing your WEP encoded passwords (in my case my password is in cleartext when sent to my UW IMAP server, of course I'm moving to something else but in the meantime)...

I would agree that 802.11* security needs to be greatly enhanced but in the meantime IPSec is a viable option for many people. And it is a available right now.

Re:5x more secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, do you have a better alternative? It's easy to say: oh, that's too complicated, we need something that stupid "Joe User" can use safely out-of-the-box. But designing that "something" seems to be the hard part.

The fact is, security solutions aren't one-size-fits-all, and they're not something you can build a plug-n-play device around. "Joe User" would do far better to understand the technology around him and manage it himself, rather than keep shelling out $200 every 2-3 months because the latest hardware that was marketed as being so secure all the sudden isn't.

Yeah, it means accepting a little responsibility for yourself, and it requires some effort. But the machines are here to stay, and the sooner people become educated in the fundamentals of secure communications, the sooner they'll regain some degree of control over their lives.

"Joe User" isn't as stupid as lazy as you think. It's just that nobody has convinced him why he should care about secure communications, or explained it a way that he can understand. Educating the public has never been very high on the tech community's priority list.

If you want to do something really worthwhile, instead of waiting for MegaCorp XYZ to design the wireless card with technology that will protect dumb old "Joe" without requiring him to do any thinking at all, how about sitting down with him, explain the dangers of unsecure communications, make analogies that he can relate to, show him how using _Free,_Open_Source_ solutions can solve his problems, and teach him how to use the tools necesasary to take care of himself.

Remember: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

Re:5x more secure?

[psamuels]

Why does IPSec with Linux seem like such a hack? FreeSwan is pretty annoying - why don't they just get IPSec into the kernel and go from there? Instead there appears to be a megapatch.

Because Linus lives in the US, and Linux is thus distributed from the US, and until relatively recently, it wasn't legal to put IPsec source on a public FTP server in the US.

Now it appears to be legal, assuming you follow particular procedures, and kernel.org does explicitly say that they are hosting crypto software now. I guess the kernel development process hasn't caught up to reality yet.

Re:5x more secure?

[cduffy]

It doesn't have to be secure (think IPsec), but I'm sure that everyone can see major benfits of making a technology that openly broadcasts data more secure.

I don't.

Picture this:

I have an incoming connection, a router, and a wireless network. I have several hosts on the wireless network. The router uses IPsec to communicate with the internal hosts, accepts only hosts with known keys, and ignores all other connections.

What is the advantage of having the wireless protocol itself have the overhead of a separate, redundant security layer? Why would you want the separate software complexity of configuring and tracking allowed-host lists for two protocol layers instead of one?

Down that path lies having every last protocol layer being complicated by trying to do a job which is handled satisfactorily by every other one. Far better to have a single layer which does security and Does It Right than to complicate 802.11 (or any other low-level protocol) by adding complex functionality which can be handled somewhere else.

Further, consider: If 802.11 has security built into it, then whenever that security is broken, 802.11 (and the hardware that uses it) needs to be changed; same for every other low-level layer. Much better to have only one higher-level layer to keep current/secure (and have to swap out the router and install new endpoint drivers in my theoretical example, but not have to replace the wireless hardware).

Re:5x more secure?

[Mike McTernan]

You are not the average user. You know about IPsec etc....

The average user probably does not know about IPsec, encryption in 802.11 makes some sense for these people - even if the solution offered is imperfect.

Re:5x more secure?

[SVDave]

So, do you have a better alternative? It's easy to say: oh, that's too complicated, we need something that stupid "Joe User" can use safely out-of-the-box. But designing that "something" seems to be the hard part.

Why?

The concepts behind securing communication via encryption have been well understood for years, yet I can't think of a single piece of consumer electronics that uses strong (>=128-bit) encryption. Cell phones, cordless phones, wireless networking, etc. should all use strong encryption, yet none of them do. Why not? Is it because of RSA/DES patent concerns? Concerns over the ability to export equipment with strong encryption? Nearly all on-line vendors use strong encryption to protect credit card information during transactions. So why isn't strong encryption used elsewhere?

If you want to do something really worthwhile, instead of waiting for MegaCorp XYZ to design the wireless card with technology that will protect dumb old "Joe" without requiring him to do any thinking at all, how about sitting down with him, explain the dangers of unsecure communications, make analogies that he can relate to, show him how using _Free,_Open_Source_ solutions can solve his problems, and teach him how to use the tools necesasary to take care of himself.

Feh. It is possible to have secure communications for even the most ignorant of users. Web browsers prove that. Your argument boils down to "ignorant users don't deserve security". That's nothing more than a load of arrogant techno-snobbery.

Re:5x more secure?

[ConsumedByTV]

Remember: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.


Remember: Light a man a fire, and you warm him for a night. Light a man on fire and you warm him for the rest of his life.

Re:5x more secure?

[Dagonkin]

Letting everybody into your house ensures a lack of computers - and TVs - and drugs - and anything else you might want to keep.

I agree with the point but the metafore smells.

Re:5x more secure?

[trolley]

Remember: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man some cliches and he still can't write worth shit.

Re:5x more secure?

[HD Webdev]

Remember: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll buy a boat and drink beer every day.

Re:5x more secure?

[cduffy]

What makes sense for these people is opportunistic IPsec bundled with the OS and enabled by default (or bundled with the wireless hardware, as the case may be). That way IPsec will be used whenever possible, no configuration required, and the user need know nothing about it.

Of course, it'll work better if they *do* some configuration -- but they'd need as much knowledge to do the same with 802.11's layer.

In short, I don't think bundling encryption with 802.11 is a bad thing. I just don't think it should be *built into* 802.11.

Re:5x more secure?

[jon doh!]

The fact is, security solutions aren't one-size-fits-all, and they're not something you can build a plug-n-play device around.

my netscreen firewall comes out of the box perfectly secure for most peoples needs. it allows everything out and nothing back in that wasn't requested. it's perfect for joe blow, even has a nice neat web interface for mr. blow. security out of the box CAN be designed, it just may take awhile.

Re:5x more secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Letting everyone into your house makes your supply of weed and vicodin disappear.

Re:5x more secure?

[Fjord]

in my case my password is in cleartext when sent to my UW IMAP server, of course I'm moving to something else but in the meantime

I use ssh forwarding to take care of this. My outlook express looks at localhost for the IMAP server. I then use TeraTerm SSH to ssh into my home system. TTSSH is set up to forward the local imap port to the imap port on my machine. SSH forwarding has done wonders for closing down ports on my firewall.

Re:5x more secure?

[cymen]

I use ssh forwarding to take care of this. My outlook express looks at localhost for the IMAP server. I then use TeraTerm SSH to ssh into my home system. TTSSH is set up to forward the local imap port to the imap port on my machine. SSH forwarding has done wonders for closing down ports on my firewall.

That is a good point. I did know about SSH forwarding but I didn't think of using it in this case. The bonus of leaving all those ports closed to the outside world is very attractive. Thanks!

Re:5x more secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

The lower in the stack the encryption is at, the easier it is to use. Do you know how long it takes to configure IPSec, and screw around with policies?

Any Joe can configure the WEP password into the driver's settings and set it on the AP, too.

Re:5x more secure?

[cduffy]

Not because being lower makes it inherently easier. Opportunistic IPsec is (in theory, and some implementations -- see Symantec's) as plug-and-play as anything -- but allows more in-depth configuration if one so desires.

Intel is not the *first*

[supz]

I was looking around SMC's site a few weeks ago and they had already released an 802.11a wireless access point.

Re:Intel is not the *first*

[Paul9196]

Didn't /. post another article on proxim releasing the first of the 802.11a products like a month ago? I remember reading it here, because I called their company and got a kit from them to try out at work. I think it was about ~$450 for two cards and ~$860 for the AP. They said the AP won't ship till the end of this month though. I received the cards today and gave it a test try. I transfered a ~730Mb divx movie from laptop to laptop through sftp connection between them in adhoc mode. I think it topped out at about ~800Kbps transfer rate and the laptops were about 3 feet from each other. I had the 2x software compression technology on as well to try and boost the speed, but considering it was a) a compressed movie b) ssh compression and c) using 2x compression from proxim, it's hard to tell how much it would help. They claim they can get 108Mbps with optimal compression on files sent. If anyone wants to learn more about how proxim's stack up, let me know and I'll let you know how well it works through their APs when they arrive.

Re:Intel is not the *first*

[Paul9196]

One more note: the only thing that would make 802.11a catch on even quicker is if the cards were backwards compatible with 802.11b networks. This would provide the ultimate in compatibility for places that just spent millions in wireless infrastructure. Alas though the technology is not compatible which means the screw to consumers and a heavier purse for the companies. Maybe sometime soon the technology will be able to co-exist in one card...but as soon as that happens, there will be a newer faster cheaper card out...It's a never ending battle that is fun to fight.

Re:Intel is not the *first*

[hackman]

Actually they say that Intel is the first to release a "suite" of products.. as far as I know the existing products only consist of the PCMCIA cards. Tricky wording, but it looks like it fooled the brilliant, sleuthy, /. editors.. and you.

Brett

Re:Intel is not the *first*

[AstroJetson]

SMC has an AP, a PCI card and a PCMCIA card. Sounds like a suite to me.

Re:Intel is not the *first*

[roguerez]

Try it without SSH, it slows down significantly. 800 Kbps is very dissappointing..

what the ???

[spike666]

oh, so the 802.11B that i'm using at home now is not real? excuse me, but... it works. its good. and even if i do have to be a wireless nazi about who gets in, it is a working feasible technology.

and cost wise... since i'm using an apple powerbook, the card is only $99

oh and by the way, the airport cards they're shipping now are 128bit capable. (no software yet...)

but it works just fine for me.

Re:what the ???

[pivo]

I agree. 802.11B is more than a net toy, my company has hundreds of people using this technology. It's far more preferable for laptop users than having to have a cat5 cable handy. For the vast majority of users, the current standard is plenty fast enough.

Re:what the ???

[daniel_isaacs]

Agreed. That was a rather silly comment for the submitter to make. I use it @ home to lay on the couch and surf the net, or work from home/recliner.

and, as you say, my company uses it extensively for difficult or impossible to cable areas. It's far from a "toy".

Re:what the ???

[mr100percent]

Airport 2.0 released today.

There is no good reason for existing 802.II......

[Anonymous Coward]

equipment to be so costly. The technology is hard new, and the componentd are now cheap. Just short sighted companies being dumb.

Will take some time though..

[shankark]

because, as I see it, its not just the corporate sector that's primarily hooked onto the wireless network, but also the universities that thrive on it. So, even though a 5x speed increase may look promising, convincing entire hordes of the traditionally sluggish-to-growth universities to shift from IEEE 802.11b to 802.11a will take a while.

Re:Will take some time though..

[Eevee]

convincing entire hordes of the traditionally sluggish-to-growth universities to shift from IEEE 802.11b to 802.11a will take a while.

Which is why Intel is offering a dual-mode expansion kit to allow the access point to support both standards.

The more interesting item to see would be a dual mode pc-card so you could hit both .11a and .11b access points as you roam about. (And I'm aware this would be quite pricy compared to a single mode card.)

Speed isn't why wireless is still a "toy!"

[NickV]

It's not speed that makes wireless a toy. It's the cost! I don't consider an 11mbps wireless connection a "toy" and if it wasn't for the costs associated, I'd jump on right now.

Come on, seriously... alot of us are still on 10mbps connections to the Internet. 11mbps is far from a toy, and the speed bump will be nice but that's NOT the issue. 54mbps, 11mbps... who cares! what about the cost!?

Re:Speed isn't why wireless is still a "toy!"

[Anonymous Coward]

> if it wasn't for the costs associated, I'd jump
> on right now.

$150 for an AP isn't all that expensive, considering what else it would buy ya...

Re:Speed isn't why wireless is still a "toy!"

[cymen]

802.11b card: $59.95 (2x$59.95 + $12.95 shipped: $132.85)
ISA to PCMCIA adapter: $24 ($24 + $8 shipped: = $32)

$164.85

So maybe a bit pricey compared to two good PCI 10/100 NICs but it isn't all that bad...

note: I have no relation to the eBay deal for the PCMCIA to ISA adapters but I did buy two and they work great with freebsd (haven't tried it with linux yet but it should be fine, will try soon). Also the eBay sale is $24 buy it now with 200 there, it isn't an auction. That guy also seems to sell some interesting 802.11 antennas (see his ebay store).

Re:Speed isn't why wireless is still a "toy!"

[cymen]

A few more details:

The idea is put the ISA to PCMCIA adapter in a computer running some sort of *nix (mine is in a FreeBSD 4.4-STABLE server) and put one of the 802.11b cards in there. Then put the other card in the laptop (in my case the laptop is running Debian unstable). It works great in IBSS Ad-Hoc mode. I happen to be using Dell TrueMobile cards (rebranded Orinoco) with 128 bit WEP but knowing what I know about WEP now and how cheap the 64 bit WEP Orinoco cards are, I would simply buy the 64 bit WEP ones and run a secure protocol like IPSec on top. I'm planning to do this but I have to find the time to figure out how to get Linux w/ FreeSwan to talk to FreeBSD's IPSec (or find a nice easy HOWTO, links appreciated).

Also it is nice to have the real Orinoco cards instead of the rebranded ones because the Orinoco firmware flasher won't flash cards not branded as Orinoco. So I can't flash my Dell TrueMobile cards to the lastest Orinoco firmware. Hopefully someone will come out with a hack...

Re:Speed isn't why wireless is still a "toy!"

[krogoth]

I think this is similar to broadband: at first I was the only one who wanted it, but now no one in my familly would think of using dial-up. I started my (wired) LAN a few months ago with 10Mbps, but now I'm on a 100Mbps segment - I just transfered the 30MB fullscreen lord of the rings trailed in 3 seconds (after downloading it to my server while I ate). Also, with wireless all stations in range will get all the packets - that's nice if you want to sniff the network, but I would really like to have a switch instead of hubs to get the maximal bandwidth out of my network. With wireless you can't get anything equivalent to switches.

Re:Speed isn't why wireless is still a "toy!"

[hobbs]

It's not speed that makes wireless a toy. It's the cost! I don't consider an 11mbps wireless connection a "toy" and if it wasn't for the costs associated, I'd jump on right now.

I believe that Intel and whoever enters this newly expanded area will first be looking at the business sector as customers. From that viewpoint, 11mbmps is rather slow. Most of these guys are running 100mbps, if not gigabit in some newer places.

At work I can set systems up doing parallel builds, all drawing sources from one or more other computers, and blasting others that are used for testing GUIs. This causes my 100mb hub to hit max capacity frequently. As the manufacturers of these devices try and sell more and more businesses on the "convenience" and "no-wire-maintenance" aspect of these devices, speed becomes more important. Sure, noone cares at home sharing 2-3 machines on their broadband link, but 50 or 500 people working together with T1 access to the world can push a lot of bits around.

Re:Speed isn't why wireless is still a "toy!"

[Joe Decker]

802.11b card: $59.95 [yahoo.com] (2x$59.95 + $12.95 shipped: $132.85) ISA to PCMCIA adapter: $24 [ebay.com] ($24 + $8 shipped: = $32)

$164.85

Checking in bug fixes from the hot tub: priceless.

Re:Speed isn't why wireless is still a "toy!"

[bt]

10mbps is great for a programmer, but don't ask a graphic designer or video editor to use a 10mbps connection!

Re:Speed isn't why wireless is still a "toy!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, here is the reality. 802.11a is going to reside in the 5.1GHz Freq and will have a limit to it's distance because of it's frequency which means ultimately you're going to have to have more access points to support the users.

It's also good to note that the true throughput speed of wireless is actually only going to be about 35Mbps.

Just some RF feedback.

better solution: same hardware

[Frothy Walrus]

i agree that 802.11a, at 54Mbps, is quite powerful, but i think the consumer would prefer an easier upgrade path: 802.11a requires entirely different hardware from 802.11 because it uses 5GHz instead of 2.5GHz. seeing as 99% of us cannot hose a 10Mbps ethernet for more than a few minutes at a time, i don't think the extra speed is going to justify to the consumer the cost of re-buying all the expensive hardware (new base station, new cards, new range-extender antennas, etc).

who knows, the market will decide. but i don't see it catching on in the next two years, at least.

Re:better solution: same hardware

[cmowire]

I think you are going to be seeing business users going for this first, not consumers.

This way, you can have 20 people in a conference room get decent bandwidth and response time while they are all participating in a meeting/training session/etc and still leave bandwidth free for Ed, who's network port was acting up this morning.

I'm all for 54Mbps because I /can/ hose a 10MBs connection. Well, that, and I don't have the stuff purchased yet, so I'll just wait a little bit and get the 54Mbps gear when I have the cash ready. Maybe they'll have WEP fixed by then, too. ;)

Re:better solution: same hardware

[krogoth]

But then some people who are broadband-for-life users may not have the average throughput of an ISDN connection. I occasionally sent a few gigs over my LAN, and at 100Mbps half-duplex I find it a bit slow. In plus, wireless has nothing comparable to a switch: every station in range gets all the packets, which slows the connection.

If I was buying wireless hardware I wouldn't expect to be able to upgrade the speed cheaply, but I think anyone who's using it for something more than consumer internet connection sharing will see speed differences between the two common speeds of wired and wireless networks. Whether they will find it worth upgrading is another question...

Re:better solution: same hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

The article said that the 802.11a access point is compatible with 802.11b adapters, easing the upgrade path a little.

Re:better solution: same hardware

[phoneboy]

Up until very recently, I was using 802.11 cards, not 802.11a or 802.11b. These max out at 2mbs. Unless I was spooling a large print job or attempting to do a large LAN-based file transfer, I hardly noticed I only had 2mb of bandwidth available to me.

The 802.11b cards appear to be a bit more reliable and have more range than the 802.11 cards, though, as they don't get disconnected as easily from the Access Point. (Using Nokia gear)

-- PhoneBoy
On the Internet, nobody care's if you're an author

Re:better solution: same hardware

[SubtleNuance]

..what are these 'consumer' things of which you speak?

Re:better solution: same hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't think the extra speed is going to justify to the consumer the cost of re-buying all the expensive hardware

Most consumers don't have any kind of wireless network, so when they go to CompUSA and see that 802.11a is the same price as 802.11b but 5x faster, they're going to buy the "a".

Re:better solution: same hardware

[crisco]

I don't think the Slashdot crowd realizes what 11Mbps means with this wireless stuff because they haven't used it, tested it and played with it.

11Mbps is the optimum 'media' transport speed. As these things operate in half-duplex mode, effective is half that. Add your overhead and error correcting and you have an effective rate of closer to 3 or 4 Mbps. When you're close to the Access Point. Move a little farther, find a wall or microwave oven and it is even lower.

A proper 10Mbps LAN does feel faster than these cards unless you're using them as a gateway to your 1.5 Mbps cablemodem. Corporations (the ones that are surviving these tough times anyway) are going to be happier with the higher speed stuff(until they realize security should be an option).

But thats all the better for those at home that want to chill on the couch and net-surf with the laptop. Prices on the 'slow' stuff are going to drop further and in the end, you're right, they are perfectly useable speeds as is.

Re:better solution: same hardware

[cneo]

Intel provides an upgrade path for 802.11b users through their dual mode expansion kit

http://www.intel.com/network

Re:better solution: same hardware

[edremy]

Up until very recently, I was using 802.11 cards, not 802.11a or 802.11b. These max out at 2mbs. Unless I was spooling a large print job or attempting to do a large LAN-based file transfer, I hardly noticed I only had 2mb of bandwidth available to me.

For a single person, 2Mbs might be ok. We've got the same solution, but instead of one person spooling a large print job, we've got 30 in a classroom attempting to download high resolution artwork. (No, not porn, unless you consider 13th century art porn.)

2Mbs is way, way too slow for this use, as we've painfully found out. We haven't even bothered with 11b, since we know we'll outgrow it way too fast. Until we can get an 11a solution wireless isn't an option here. I spent a lot of time talking to the Intel folks at EDUCAUSE a few weeks ago about what we need to roll it out...

Eric

Re:better solution: same hardware

[Fjord]

But each student gets their own 2Mbps, regardless of how many others are on the network. You's have to run a 100Mbps line to the server they are connecting to, but the alternative is running lines everywhere.

5x faster

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

to hack : doesn't 802.11a use RC4 like 802.11b ?

Re:5x faster

[swillden]

to hack [usethesource.com] : doesn't 802.11a use RC4 like 802.11b ?

Yep. And the time to hack is directly related to the number of packets seen, so 5x faster is 5x faster to hack, assuming saturation.

BTW, just in case WEP is giving RC4 a bad name, it should be pointed out that RC4 is a very good, very secure stream cipher, when used correctly. WEP just violates the cardinal rule of RC4 which is "Thou shalt discard the first n bytes after rekeying". The 'n' in question varies over time as attacks improve, but RC4 is fast enough that most systems that use it set n=1024. Massive overkill, but that's okay; RC4 is so fast, it's almost free.

Re:5x faster

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, RC4 is *not* a 'very good, very secure' stream cipher. The problem is predictability of the stream, as presented in "Weaknesses in the key scheduling algorithm of RC4" [http://eyetap.org/~rguerra/toronto2001/rc4_ksapro c.pdf].

-Ross

not actually first??

[sr105]

Wasn't there an article on here a while back about another company that was delivering 802.11a "first"?

Re:not actually first??

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Proxim was the first company to release 802.11a products.

Since when

[Anonymous Coward]

was /. a PR news site?

Re:Since when

[Anonymous Coward]

/. need make money. You let /. make money, you get keep talkin. You be glad for you can say any thing at all, yes? You have can ignore bad post if you be not unknown to us.

microwave

[frantzen]

but does it interfere with my microwave? faster net versus no programming food. thats a hard one.

Re:microwave

[basking2]

If you run your feedline through a sufficiently hefty amplifier, I'm sure you could cook while surfing eliminating the need for a microwave! Fixing dinner would require at least an email check or two. :-) (Just don't stand to close...)

Re:microwave

[Anonymous Coward]

but since 802.11a has a 5 GHz carrier, this band is far from microwave ovens at 2.45 GHz...

802.11b isn't a toy

[tonyc.com]

"[T]his new technology will really make wireless a possible alternative instead of a neat item to play with."

Excuse me, but an 11 megabit wireless connection isn't quite worthless just yet. How many home users, even with DSL or cable modems, are pushing this limit? And how many offices are still using 10baseT LANs, or 10baseT hubs on even faster LANs? To all these users, 802.11b is still 10% overkill. Will 400% overkill make us any happier or more productive?

Plus, 802.11a is much more power-hungry, making it a decidedly unattractive choice for wireless PDAs. What say ye?

Re:802.11b isn't a toy

[Gedvondur]

Ahh, but the rub is that because of the shared nature of the wireless medium. You only really get about 4-5mb out of an 11mb wireless connection. You don't get full "wire speed" (ironic, isn't it) because you can't switch wireless like you can a wired system. Thus there is a "is the medium clear?" kind of traffic.

Re:802.11b isn't a toy

[scumdamn]

If a company has multiple access points, though, the wireless systems roam between access points and there end up being fewer clients associated per AP. Also, some access points (like the Dell AP-1000) have two wireless cards with each acting as an antenna. This also segregates the client base.

Re:802.11b isn't a toy

[Anonymous Coward]

You think you've contradicted the parent post, but in fact you've made his point more poignant. Given your numbers, his "10% overkill" becomes "100-150% overkill". The point being that it was overkill.

Atheros has 802.11a chips and drivers

[billstewart]

Their web site says that they've announced that ALPS will be using their chipset; I don't remember who else will be using it.

Not the first

[mosch]

Despite what this article says, Intel is not the first company to release 802.11a devices. Proxim has the Harmony line of 802.11a devices, and has for some time.

Slashdot needs a fact checker.

Re:Not the first

[CaseyHaxor]

For those of you interested, I wrote a review a while back on Proxim's 802.11a / 2X cards. These are the radios that are 802.11a compatible and also claim a blazing 108mbps bitrate.

http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/ProximR ev iew

What nonsense

[benploni]

The whole premise of this story is wrong. 802.11b is NOT a toy; it a very useful technology. 11Mb/s is not to be sneezed at. Who are you kidding? 99% of network apps are thrilled to run at that speed.

Second, 802.11a has issues of its own. Most importantly, it is WAY shorter range, and can be blocked by a wet piece of paper. 802.11b is so robust, people have run over several miles (with special antennas).

More importantly, networking is *infrastucture* and displacing infrastructure is hard. All those laptops with builtin 802.11b arent going away. Neither are all those deployed Access points.

I forsee 802.11b having continued success, at even cheaper prices.

Re:What nonsense

[cmowire]

Last I heard, the 802.11a gear had less range in paper, i.e. you can't get the 5x speed at especially good range, but the range within which you can get a decent signal in the multi-megabit range is actually at least as good as 802.11b. As in, it has more bandwidth to degrade over.

Of course, what could also happen is we see dual 802.11a/b gear. Which is fine for a number of reasons, including the multi-mile range with antenas, the lowered power consumption (If that is, in fact the case) for PDA usage, and upgradability.

Re:What nonsense

[AlexCV]

Sounds a lot like a Lucent AP1000, just swap one of the orinoco's for an 802.11a model when they become available...

Re:What nonsense

[dragonfly_blue]

Yep, the AP1000's are sweet. Kudos to whoever thought of making an access point with two PCMCIA cards. Hopefully Lucent/Orinoco/Avaya will stay in business long enough to bring the price down though...

Re:What nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

The only nonsense here flows from your mouth. What article are YOU Talking about? Show me where Slashdot says 802.11b is a toy? Are you making this up as you go? I see a Slashdot link to a Intel press release...nothing more. Please spout your own offtopic nonsense somewhere else. Who scores this junk?

Re:What nonsense

[Jon_E]

heck yeah - 11Mb/s is quite fast! - but actually, well written network apps should only need 9600baud - so packet radio is the real way to go! .. it's much longer range and much more robust!

come to think of it 640KB should be more than enough memory for most real users too .. GUIs are for wimps!

Re:What nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

The AP-1000 won't support 802.11A cards. You need the new AP-2000 that contains more RAM and a stronger CPU and can hold both 802.11B and 802.11A cards.

802.11B versus 802.11A?

[Bowie J. Poag]

Lets hope it brings prices on 802.11b gear down a little. I'm looking forward to doing some Wardriving in Chicago next summer. :)

Cheers,

what id really like is

[Fembot]

a) less latency
b) more range

so that i can sit within say a mile of my house with a laptop and play quake... or even setup a lan with some friends down the road

Proxima also has an 802.11a product

[hackman]

Proxim also has a line of 802.11a stuff, possibly a little further along. They have an Access Point that should be available at the end of November roughly, but the cards are available now supposedly. There is a company called Luna Communications handling the early release stuff.. Lunacom.com

Here's the link to Proxim

We're planning on getting a setup soon, the claim of 54Mbit/s from the x2 technology sounds way too good to be true! Anyone have experience on actual speeds that they get? I've never even gotten close to 1/2 of the 802.11b bandwitdh maximum (11Mbit/s).

Brett

Intel Not 1st to Market with 802.11a

[PhotonSphere]

Proxim has had 802.11a wireless gear out for a little while now. Their Harmony 802.11a FastWireless Kit is a prime example. In fact, we have an 802.11a wireless node up in our community wireless freenet.

While the improvement in throughput is excellent, it comes at a cost of range. The 5.4GHz spectrum does not carry as far as the 2.4GHz band, used in 802.11b. This difference will be felt the most in long-range applications, whether it be a directional long-shot or the more omni-directional community wireless networks such as BAWUG or Houston-Wireless.

--
The Sphere Guerilla Net
Space City, TX

Driver issues with 802.11a for Linux, non-MS OS's

[billstewart]

802.11b wasn't much of a problem for Linux - the cards look about like an Ethernet card, with some extra frobs you can tweak if you want to (e.g. the so-called security features, and features that tell you how the RF sections are doing.) I'm told that 802.11a is much different - it expects much more driver support from the operating system, somewhat the same way that Winmodems do. Some of the chip and card makers are working on Linux driver support, but before using 802.11a you'll need to find out how much you really get from them, and when - they've got an obvious market priority to get Windows working first.

Bandwidth isn't what we need

[melanarchy]

"wireless a possible alternative instead of a neat item to play with."
I feel that the biggest downside to current wireless is not the speed, which even at the 6.0mbps that I was getting in a lecture hall this morning while I was in #coverage in slashnet being obsessive about today's crash, but the range. Just under 500ft away I was getting 0% reception. Most people use very little bandwidth the majority of the time they are using any sort of networking and in most cases it is reliability rather then speed that is the limiting factor. Intel's site doesn't say anything about an increase in range only in speed, and as nice it will be to be able to stream audio, video, and serve a webpage over a wireless connection I do not really see the need for 55mbps over 11mbps.

When we start to see antenna's that are more then just useless screens and reliability without line of site is when you'll see more of a push to wireless.

Re:Bandwidth isn't what we need

[vanguard]

Well, of course you're right. The reason to choose 55Mbs over 11mbs is that you might need it because it's shared. If you're in a lecture hall (like you were) and everybody was connected you can easily use up 11Mbs.

Anyway, this probably isn't news to you and I agree, *I* need more range, not bandwidth.

Re:Bandwidth isn't what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is Intel's idea of range improvement!

"Superior speeds hold even as range increases"

"Indoors:
54 Mbps @ 40 feet
6 Mbps @ 300 feet"

"Outdoors:
54 Mbps @ 100 feet
6 Mbps @ 1000 feet"

see http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/products /5000_cardbus_adapter.htm

i wonder about the range...

[proxeus]

hmmm... how far will this standard trasmit with a reliable connection... my school doesnt like it as it is that theres a network cable connected to my laptop in my locker... will i be albe to set up a webcam connected to my laptop connect to the lab computers with 802.11a so i can see whos in my locker...? those stupid mexicans are really buggin me... what about the worlds first 802.11a controlled paintball gun operated via the web... hmm....

Re:i wonder about the range...

[User1234]

Well the range is not supposed to be that great. The frequency it uses is very close to the frequency of light and like light 802.11a has problems going through walls.

wireless phones?

[vanguard]

And you can use the gigahertz cordless phones and microwaves without worying about it messing with your wireless connectivity, even though you mostly just have to wory about the gigahertz phones.

Does this information come from anything reliable or perhaps your own experience? I just ask because I've been using 802.11b hub/cards for months in my house (and at work) and I've never noticed any issues with my connection.

Re:wireless phones?

[cmowire]

I do know that the Microwave one is more along the lines where if you have interference from it, you probably should be worying about getting baked by standing in front of it instead of dropping packets.

But the last time it came up on Slashdot, people were chiming in that certain brands of phones really suck when used in conjunction with Wireless Ethernet. Which makes sense. They are using the exact same band, which will degrade the signal to varying extents.

Of course, consumer reports found that the gigahertz phones tend to perform worse than the equivelently featured 900MHz phone. But the manufacturers have their hearts set on the gigahertz phones, so they are making sure that the 900MHz ones suck.

Re:wireless phones?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since we got a new wireless phone, the microwave interferes with it. It is stationed 20cm from the microwave, but in exactly the same place as the old phone. Very strange....

Re:wireless phones?

[jon doh!]

i think there was also an issue with x10 stuff and either 900MHz phones, wireless ethernet, or both.

Re:wireless phones?

[cprael]

Something reliable - the frequencies used. 802.11b uses the same 2.4Ghz freq. space used by high-end portable phones. 802.11a, in contrast, uses the 5Ghz band.

Does Proxim Own INTEL?

[rochlin]

Proxim has been really hot on 802.11a technology because, even though they were the first with the old 1.5Mbps tech, they were last with 802.11b.

The big question: Does anyone know? Is Intel just an OEM for Proxim's 802.11a product? (Proxim also had new product announcements today) Intel OEMs other wireless stuff from Proxim.

Maybe Proxim will be the big player in 802.11a.
BOTH Intel's and Proxim's new products are based on the ATHEROS 802.11a chipset.

Re:Does Proxim Own INTEL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, you do know that this means that 802.11a will die a nasty death and Proxim will have rushed their products out for nothing and subsequently go out of business, just because that's how Murphy's law works, right? ;)

Re:Does Proxim Own INTEL?

[kwj8fty1]

no - but most of the cards have been based on the same chipsets: Prism line, and the Hermes line. The prism-based chipset is quite mature, however, each manufacturer adds custom extensions to each card. Hermes is the much more pricey version - - All (most?) of the lucent/cisco/aironet/orionco cards are based on this.

Proxim has done some really wacky stuff with 802.11a - - They have an "overdrive" version of 802.11a, called x2. It's able to operatate at 100mbits, in a lab. This is not a standard, and I would stay away from proxim based cards. I don't know what chipset the new intel based cards are using, but I'd bet it's not something they made.

Re:Does Proxim Own INTEL?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, believe or not, intel does have a wireless division. They have acquired several wireless companies in the SF bay area. They also have a strong connection with a lot of wireless research going on at universities. I wouldn't be surprised if they used their own chips.

There is an abundance of startup companies in the valley working on 802.11a. Several have "turbo" modes that claim to operate at 72-100 Mbps. I have seen demonstrations of uncompressed video being transmitted through the ether. Those data rates are definitely usable. If you want to see what's currently on the research plate, be prepared to be amazed at 5 Gbps wireless links.... perhaps in a few years.

I'M SO CONFUSED!

[Anonymous Coward]

the first 802.11A wireless LAN devices which offer more than a fivefold increase in speed over the current 802.11B

AARGH!!! I'm so confused!

'A' is lower than 'B' in the alphabet, so doesn't that mean that it would be worse, not better?

In computers, if it has a higher number, that means it's better, right? RIGHT?

Recommended wireless NICs for war driving?

[Helevius]

Can anyone recommend a NIC with a decent range to conduct war driving? I'm looking at the vulnerability assessment angle here. Ideally I'd like a NIC supported by Linux and Windows 2000. AirSnort, supports only a handful of cards (AirSnort uses the Prism2 chipset). No card listed seems to win praise for its range, based on user reviews I've read. Can anyone comment on this?

Helevius

Re:Recommended wireless NICs for war driving?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used my Orinoco Silver card and netstumbler to great effect here in Sydney Australia.

Re:Recommended wireless NICs for war driving?

[mindstrm]

I think when it comes to airsnort, it's Rx sensitivity that you really want.

Any card will do, just get an antennae more suited to the job.

Heck.. if you're driving around breaking into networks, why not break the law a little more and use some amplifiers?

Re:Recommended wireless NICs for war driving?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck.. if you're driving around breaking into networks, why not break the law a little more and use some amplifiers? Because you want the network to talk back as well.

Old news

[kwj8fty1]

Intel has had these out for months. THey just had some promo stuff going on at comdex. Here at seattle wireless, we've been looking at these from september on...


http://www.seattlewireless.net/archive/ezmlm.cgi?m ss:3330:200109:jmocpdnheipoknihcbpa

Already Posted: Proxim

[carbon60]

I submitted/posted a link to Proxim's site about this a while ago.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/16/132122 4

Re:Already Posted: Proxim

[Anonymous Coward]

Never do this. Might as well just go generate a new userid and change your IP address, now.

-- Conform or be cast out! - Rush

Re:Already Posted: Proxim

[carbon60]

Eh?

Why is that? Please explain.

but the range is less...

[Gaewyn L Knight]

One of the big trade offs though is that in using 5ghz instead of 2.4ghz the range for the same output power is cut to about 1/4 that of 802.11b

Speed is great when inside your house for long hauls we need to be looking forward to 802.11g and such... 802.11g is targeted at only 20mbs but the range stays the same with the lower frequency range.

Have they fixed the problem with WEP?

[tuxlove]

Unless 802.11a fixes the totally broken WEP security used with "better" 802.11b products, I don't view this as an improvement. I'm pissed that I spent so many $$ on wireless products with "128 bit encryption", only for that encryption standard to be found practically useless due to fundamental implementation flaws. I sincerely hope a new generation of wireless users aren't faced with the same bogus problems. The link to the Intel site provides no useful info on this subject, nor do any of the articles on the web that I dug up.

Even if 802.11a fixes those problems, I'll still be pissed if they don't come out with a new standard for 802.11b (and a firmware upgrade for my Lucent wireless cards that implements the fix). I don't feel like throwing my expensive wireless hardware in the trash just yet.

Re:Have they fixed the problem with WEP?

[Anonymous Coward]

802.11b isn't useless at all, and I don't even think you wasted your money. ACL's in combination with IPSEC makes for a very reasonable solution (assuming your access point supports ACL's, which it damn well should).

Re:Have they fixed the problem with WEP?

[kwj8fty1]

You can't assume that ***ANY*** wireless connectivity will be secure - - - Even with things like WEP, you should use SSH/ssl/etc. Also, it takes over 1 million packets to get a 128bit key on 802.11b. If you change your key once a day (or once a month even), then you are safe. There are tools for automaticly updating the keys, and it's a good idea anyway. If you are worried about security, take your head out of your $#$@ and get it setup right. Don't blame the vendors/protocol because you have only one layer of security. It's just like you left a cat5 cable hanging out of your office, and blaming the hub manufacturer that it's their fault when you get hacked. Gimmie a break.

Re:Have they fixed the problem with WEP?

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be missing the point of wireless security.

It's not the sniffing that we're worried about. That's not unique to wireless at all. What we're worried about is someone attaching to our networks without permission. Just imagine if someone connected to your wireless network and proceeded to hack foo.gov - foo.gov would come looking for you, now wouldn't they?

Re:Have they fixed the problem with WEP?

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, speaking of "at a distance", a fellow named Peter Shipley has connected to 802.11 networks at a distance of 15 miles using a special antenna and amplifier. Yes, 15 miles. Sorry, no direct link, search for it yourself.

Re:Have they fixed the problem with WEP?

[tuxlove]

I *do* have ACLs set up, and I *do* have WEP set up, and I *do* use ssh. I also have my wireless subnet in my DMZ. That still won't stop someone from cracking my key and hijacking one of my MAC addresses and using it when that host is otherwise idle. That gives them the ability to at least surf the web using my pipe, and also gives them the opportunity to try to exploit the ssh daemon or other services open to the DMZ which they normally wouldn't be able to even touch. Existing tools make it all too easy, because WEP is fucked up.

Sure, you can change your password daily, but I send a lot more than a million packets a day over the wire. It's simply a race. Automated tools for updating the WEP password are not a true solution, because they have to update nodes over the wireless network. If someone cracks your password one day, then he can observe future password changes. Changing the password on the device locally, by hand, is impractical because there can potentially be zillions of nodes to update (And in some cases they might be physically difficult to reach. Imagine remote cameras or devices in the trunk of your car, both of which I have done.)

And your analogy to hanging an Ethernet cable out of your office isn't even close. Nobody makes a hub that requires you to hang a cable out your window; if they did, then they would be to blame. But they don't, because that would be stupid. However, when you use a wireless network, you have no choice but to hang a cable out your window. Granted, the cable takes a little work to reach, but there it is. That's what I'm complaining about. If they fixed WEP, then perhaps you'd need a crane to reach that cable instead of a stepladder.

Re:Have they fixed the problem with WEP?

[kwj8fty1]

So, the simple solution is to use VPN, if you need it to be that secure. Only one open port on a cisco PIX, which most folks hang directly off the net anyway. Easy solution. If you need security, do something like that, or don't use 802.11x.

> However, when you use a wireless network, you have no choice but to hang a cable out your window.

Ummm... no... try again. If you only have WEP as your security, and aren't able to setup anything more secure, you are basiclly opening the bloody window.

no!

[Anonymous Coward]

so what, its 5x faster

what does that matter? What people want more is *any* bandwidth (and 802.11b can do 11mps anyhow) - where there is none, what does speed matter when its > than a slow modem anyway?

I'm part of the london consume.net project here - see what they have to say about it. Oh, and if you're in london join in. Especially in soho, i want to read ./ while in the pub.

~themocktor

Re:no!

[tuxlove]

what does that matter? What people want more is *any* bandwidth (and 802.11b can do 11mps anyhow) - where there is none, what does speed matter when its > than a slow modem anyway?

For the average home user, you're right. 11mbps is plenty good, since that's significantly faster than your usual DSL or modem connection. 54 mbps will be very useful, however, for corporate networks where you have lots of users banging on the wireless space at the same time, often communicating between corporate hosts and not surfing the web. Remember that wireless is not switched like most Ethernet networks. Everyone shares the network space, and bandwidth utilization increases dramatically as you add more active users. The most *any one* user can get out of the network is 11mbps, but if you have 10 people using it at once then they would, at best, get 1.1mbps on the average. At full tilt, though, the throughput would probably be much lower due to collisions, etc.

And for corporate sites with very fat pipes, even one user could benefit from more than 11mbps, because the wireless link ends up being the bottleneck to the Internet.

Re:no!

[TheM0cktor]

I got an account now too. Can you tell i'm drunk? But somebody please mod the post up a bit, then more people will know about consume.net and i can post with my new account from the dog and duck round the corner. Please? Someone?

Re:no!

[kwj8fty1]

a> You are missing the fact that 11mbits is the raw speed, and it's really only like 5-6
b> You are forgetting how to setup 3 APs in one zone, sector panels for higher denisity, and other tricks to increase bandwidth in one given space. 11mbit is more than ample, in 99% of the cases. Look at what apple did with airports - - something like 2000 users in a very small area...

But, it's cheaper in the long run to have a higher bitrate - -just so long as you can do the same tricks as above.

what a stupid thing to say

[Anonymous Coward]

this new technology will really make wireless a possible alternative instead of a neat item to play with.

What a stupid thing to say. I use wireless on a regular basis, and I don't consider it a neat toy at all. It's a very real, very effective tool. Similarly, I could pretend that all your "fast ethernet" is just a toy in comparison to myrinet.

Simply not fair.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Have you actively priced this? Cheap access points are in the sub- $100 on pricewatch. PCMCIA cards are down to half that. As a hobbyist, this is well within your reach... as an IT guy for some business or another, if the price is stopping you, I'd bail out now, they're going under. Businesses should see something as cheap when it's still 20 times too expensive for me to buy/consider.

And don't try to tell me that you need more than one cardbus nic... that's BS too. Certainly 802.11 is cool for networking your laptop so you can surf while watching TV in the living room, or even to give the PDA some real connectivity. But if you're saying it's too expensive to network your house with it, the time you spent whining was enough to wire it properly in cat5... the way things oughtta be done.

Re:Simply not fair.

[scumdamn]

I've found that the best way to create a network is to have your laptop systems use wireless and your desktops use the wired "backbone".

Our three laptops and print server are all wireless but our desktops are all hardwired.

Short Range is goog

[EccentricAnomaly]

Second, 802.11a has issues of its own. Most importantly, it is WAY shorter range, and can be blocked by a wet piece of paper. 802.11b is so robust, people have run over several miles (with special antennas).

Short range prevents network leakage and enhances security, which can be a good thing.

Re:Short Range is goog

[Jon_E]

network leakage? i'm sorry - but do you understand the difference between RF and plumbing?

and security by short range is almost as bad as saying "security by obscurity" .. you goog head!

Range of 802.11a vs. 802.11b

[fatty545]

1 megabyte pdf on the range of 802.11a This pdf talks about the range of 802.11a and how they tested it, and it also includes some cool charts comparing it to 802.11b. It turns out the farther your computer is away from the base station the slower the connection is.

Re:Range of 802.11a vs. 802.11b

[kaladorn]

I don't know if quite the same rules apply, but when I worked in police wireless, this kind of phenomenon wasn't uncommon. The further away you were from the base, the more chance for a packet to get corrupted (slightly more anyway) and the more chance for something to interfere with your transmission or for any given packet to not make it through (especially if you get near the thresholds for reception -- noise threshold I think the formal term was).

Also movement in a vehicle tends to increase the number of "fades" in proportion to the speed of the vehicle (FYI). But this won't apply to 802.11.... it isn't really meant as a network-on-the-move solution, more of a move-stop-network-move_again kind of solution.

Up and downwars compatibility?

[pigeon]

Is there some up or downwards compatibility between 802.11a and 802.11b or are these completely different incompatible devices? Or are there dual protocol devices on the market?

Re:Up and downwars compatibility?

[emeb2]

802.11a uses OFDM whereas 802.11b uses DSSS, and they're in completely different frequency bands. Consequently, dual-protocol devices can't share much of their hardware between the two standards. Right now, there aren't any chipsets that support both, although there are some in the works - the major hardware vendors are keenly aware of the need for this.

Glee

[Drake42]

Come on now. We all know that the only reason
90% of slashdot cares about wireless networks is
so we can surf the internet from a backyard hammock.

I want to throw a party in my back yard with speakers sprinkled through the bushes all feeding from a laptop which is streaming music from the internet. I will sit amongst my friends, smiling at the glorious sound and they will know that I am the alpha geek.

We will have an outdoor lan party arranged so each team can see their team mates monitors ala aliens without having to worry about getting all the ethernet plugs right. Are the wired plugs a hassle? No. But That Is Not The Point.

Technology is its own reward. Anyone complaining that 11a is overkill has forgetten their childlike glee. :]

agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

certainly, point taken. This will probably affect corporate/large organisation uptake if wifi.

but as a geek toy bandwidth really isn't important - as an example did a whole bunge of geeks suddenly rush into networking when 100base cards were released? Of course not, the fact that a reasonable network is there is more important to geeks than increases in already-usable bandwidth

~themocktor

802.11a throughput rate is not very high

[Anonymous Coward]

As a comment on 802.11a the effective throughput rate is usually less than 20 Mbps. At the highest data rate of 54 Mbps air-rate the effective SNR requirements are about 65 dB which means that you better be pretty close range at such a high freuqency of ~5 GHz. Effectively you will get half the range of 802.11b in the air and even shorter distances for the maximum data rate. Do not think for a minute that 802.11a is panacea, it is not. It is merely an evolution into another band using OFDM modulation for better spectral efficiency than 802.11b.

Alan

Re:802.11a throughput rate is not very high

[kaladorn]

Your comments are bang on. But this problem seems to extend to most wireless tech. When I worked with RDLAP-19.2, MDC-4800 or 9600, and CDPD (19.2) wireless networks, the same phenomena was visible (moreso in RDLAP...). We'd often only get usable bandwidth on the order of 40-60% of advertised bandwidth. Heck, I recall days on the 9600 bps nominal network where practical bit rates hit about 2400...

The longer you are transmitting for (the larger the packet), the more likely you'll get a fade or some interference and your packet will be corrupted. And with phones and other devices operating through the same spectra, and with crappy antennas bouncing out signal harmonics that can tromp your signal, this isn't really surprising. Just sort of an occupational hazard in the wireless environment.

When I ported one of our products to CDPD, I recall that it had a spec limit of 2020 for packet size 9or something like that)... but the local wireless provider advised me they'd never got anything over about a 1300 byte packet to transit the network without a problem. I got 1400 byte packets working... but that's where I capped it.

Even having said all this, and realizing 802.11b has a different performance characteristic than 802.11a, it will still (most of the time) end up being faster, which really is what end users tend to care about. If it only ends up 2x as fast, so be it. If it is only 2x as expensive, you're doing okay. Now, if its 5x as expensive and in practice averages 2x as fast... well.... then you've bought the Pentium-IV of the wireless world.... (*grin*)

Anti-soltution.. and rationale

[d.valued]

Unless you happen to be some kind of alien (or corporate) super-genius, you can't just take a 5 GHz antenna, slap it onto a 2.4 GHz transmitter, repackage it, and call it 802.11a.

First off, the componants for a 5GHz transmitter need to be (and are) smaller than the componants for a 2.4GHz system. This is why 2.4GHz phones and 802.11b cards have effective antennas within such a small form factor, and this is also why 11a cards have greater range. The antenna that can be fit into a Type II or CF slot would provide approx. a 10 dB gain (or double the effective radiated power) of the 2.4 antenna. (Besides that, a 5 GHz signal can be sent from a 2.4 GHz antenna with a little shrinking for that gain.)

The reason the transmitter is smaller is that the signal is much more easily affected by the environment, and by shrinking the distances between componants (and the componants themselves) one reduces that possibility.

In addition, the hardware has to be capable of handling the increased thoroughput. If you put a 100baseTX card on a Cat4 based network, it ain't gonna get you full bandwidth; likewise, a 10baseT on a Gigabit Ethernet connection can't do squat. 11a's guts are different from 11b's.

Also... about security in wireless: Let's make this clear. Any form of broadcast-based system, be it wired (like Ethernet) or wireless (802.11x), IS VULNERABLE TO EAVESDROPPING. Security has to be made application-level, like IPsec, SSL, SSH, and not hardware level. Especially if everyone has access to (sufficiently similar) hardware.

Re:Anti-soltution.. and rationale

[Detritus]

3 dB of gain doubles the ERP. 10 dB of gain increases the ERP by ten times. A high-gain antenna is. by definition, directional. Are you going to require the user to aim the antenna at the nearest access point? That does not seem practical for mobile computing devices.

Re:Anti-soltution.. and rationale

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, theoretically, transmission at higher frequencies lead to shorter range if the effective antenna areas are scaled down accordingly.

First off, free space propagation of plane waves is the same for all frequencies. The only reason why higher frequencies would result in lower range is because of smaller effective areas for antennas at higher frequencies. Take a dipole for example resonant with a 2.5 GHz system. Now move to 5 GHz, you would have to shrink the dipole length by 2 to maintain similar antenna impedances which is necessary to stay resonant. That would result in the antenna areas decreasing by a factor of 4, thus resulting in a 3 dB increase in the path loss.

I've seen demonstrations where they claim that 5 GHz and 2.5 GHz systems have the same range. I don't know what other things they've done, but it's not because of the carrier and antennas. maybe they're using more power? maybe they have less things blocking the way? but in theory, if you keep everything the same, but just do a shift in frequency (change components and antenna etc.. by scaling everything), higher frequency systems have shorter range.

Re:Anti-soltution.. and rationale

[Lumpy]

Excuse me, but any antenna on a PC board in a pcmcia slot can only hope for unity gain. a 5/8 wave antenna is only 3DB gain and anything eles like a colinear or other advanced omnidirectional designs cannot be etched onto a pc board.

The lucent wavelan cards have a -5DB gain antenna on them... you actually lose signal strength in them.

Mercedes-Benz rolls out drive-by Ethernet

[A Commentor]

From infoworld: Mercedes-Benz has 802.11a in a car... Interesting article even though it was 'rejected' by /.

Mercedes-Benz showcases a car of the near future with a built-in wireless Ethernet 802.11a connection that will capture high-speed bursts of data from roadside transceivers as the car hurtles down the highway.

Re:Mercedes-Benz rolls out drive-by Ethernet

[Anonymous Coward]

How can this possibly work? If a car is "hurtling" down a highway, it seems to me it's not going to be in range of any stationary base station for very long. Take away from this the time required to discover a network and establish a connection and you're left with some tiny length of time to actually transfer data. Not to mention doppler problems, etc...

Laptop speeds limited

[BarefootClown]

Glad somebody else has noticed this. I have an 802.11b network at home, and another at work; I use them to keep my (and my roommates') laptop(s) on the network without having to drag 100+ feet of Cat5 around the place. Do I feel limited by using "only" 11Mbps? Hell, no! I rarely break 1Mbps--on any network. I used to use a 100Mbps wired network, with a decent NIC in my laptop (3Com hardware NIC, not a WinNIC), a decent 100MBps switch, and still rarely broke 1Mbps, even with my desktop machines running closer to 50 Mbps. Why? In short, laptops suck. Seriously--when you're looking for performance, you don't look at laptops. The hard drives are much slower than anything in a desktop, the bus speeds are slower (my laptop has a 66MHz FSB; my desktop has a 133, with DDR RAM); everything is slower and scaled back. 11Mbps is no limit to a laptop, in my experience. It would be a limit to a desktop terminal connected to the WLAN, but most people/companies don't use wireless for desktops.

Granted, we could probably saturate the WLAN if we had twenty or so people all trying to pull large files, but that condition has its own flaws: 1) how often does the situation occur--even in a meeting, with 30 people attending, how many of them are trying to pull big files at a given time (usually none...), and 2) how many clients can an access point actually handle? Most of the ones with which I'm familiar (consumer equipment, admittedly) get flaky around 20-30 people; any more, and you need another AP--add another AP, and you effectively double the bandwitdh, as you're splitting the load across two different AP's, each on a different channels. Also remember than many networks are still only 10 Mbps, because of the high infrastructure cost of upgrading a major network (particularly if recabling is required); on such a network, the bit behind the AP is already the bottleneck, so it's not that big of a deal if the WLAN is only 11Mbps.

In short, yeah, it's neat, it's cool, but it's not that big of a deal, as long as laptops don't get a major bus upgrade. A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.

Re:Laptop speeds limited

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, though... That 11Mbps is labratory thoery. In practice, I have not been able to acheive greater than 3Mbps over wireless (and to be sure, any hard drive is quite capable of that, the same computer hooked to switched 100b transfers 6MB/s easily.) Wireless (especially on the 2.4 ghz range) is very succeptible to environmental noise, (how much more powerful is that damn microwave you say?) cell phones, wireless phones, baby monitors, spy satellites (just kidding about that one) all operate on this free range. 5.4ghz is a closed band, so in thoery there should be less noise for 802.11A when it comes out, but in all liklihood, it won't really pump out 55mbps.

Re:Laptop speeds limited

[Tristan7]

Actually you couldn't saturate the WLAN with 20 people pulling files down. It's only a half duplex system, just like a hub, not a switch.

Re:what we'd all really like is

[Anonymous Coward]

for you to reach puberty and graduate high school!

55 Mb/s will be nice.

[Genady]

To all of you naysayers saying that 11Mb/s is plenty... try running Outlook 2000 across a wireless link. I have with Orinoco cards and it is painful when stepping down from 100Mb/s Ethernet.

Even with higher costs and shorter ranges 55Mb/s would be very good in a corporate environment. I just wish they could get the price of access points down.

Belt and Suspenders

[Detritus]

The conservative approach to communications security is to use end-to-end and link encryption.

backwards compatability?

[graphicartist82]

Are 802.11A & 802.11B network hardware compatible? If not, i can see that being a blow to anybody who has already purchased a whole 802.11B network, but wants the 802.11A speed once it is more commonplace... I can see the 802.11A & B cards not being compatible, but could the access points be salvaged?

Faster shower porn!

[asink]

More porn in the shower for me, and faster! Maybe I'll be able to stream better quality live clips...

"possible alternative"?

[sfe_software]

I never thought 802.11b was that slow. I've been using it for my laptop since February, and at 11 megabits, it's plenty fast enough IMO. Sure, it's not 100 MB/sec but it is wireless...

If you're refering to range issues (eg, an alternative for more broad coverage), then I'll agree. But for home and office intranet usage, 802.11b is more than suitable. Even with cable/xDSL/T1, it's considerably faster than your external connection anyway...

The one really good thing that might come of this IMO is that 802.11b products may go way down in price once the faster alternative is made available...

How about airport?!?!

[Niksie3]

I'm using Apple's airport right now and it is supposed to be 11mb/sec!!!!

I suppose a conventional 802.11 connection is 2mb/sec 5x 2mb/sec is 10mb/sec apples airport is supposed to be 11mb/sec.

10mb/sec 11mb/sec

Conclusion: BTSIDI (been there, seen it, done it)

Re:How about airport?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

did you think before you typed?

Re:How about airport?!?!

[DirkDaring]

He uses Apple products. Why should he start now?

This is news?

[Luminous Coward]

Nevermind I've had several legitimate wireless submissions rejected. How is an Intel press release news? (I am now a sour geek).

If you dig PR, then head to 802.11 Planet. You'll get all the corporate lubing you could ever hope for.

802.11a is not new, it's been around since 1999. Check the IEEE website. They have the document available for free download.

802.11b seems like it's good enough for most

[mj6798]

I run VNC, MP3, video streams, games, and backups over 802.11b. If wireless gets faster, that's nice. But I don't really have a desparate need for it, and I suspect few other peopled do either.

Re:802.11b seems like it's good enough for most

[spike666]

for me, 80211b is sufficient - my dsl is only a max 640kbps inbound. so anything faster on my wireless isnt necessary.

that being said, i should also state that i dont do much (but i do some) networking from the laptop to the local server. but for that, the 5.5 mpbs seems reasonable (5.5 since you cant really get 11mb)

It's fast but look at the range

[ibex42]

802.11a is not as great as it seems. The range at which you can get 54Mpbs is only 10-15 meters. It's only great if you use it within those distances. 802.11a only offers 11Mbps in the 30-40m range which is half the range of 802.11b @ 11Mbps.

Many people will want to stick with 802.11b because it will still cost less even if the 802.11a nics are no more expensive. 802.11a means many more access points for the same amount of coverage as a 802.11b network.

Beware the marketing hype!

Re:It's fast but look at the range

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm confused. Nothing new here.

But the SMC access point claims a 1600+ foot range operating at 6 mbit outdoors. When I was looking at 2.4 ghz Orinoco solutions, 350 meters was considered lucky, around 1,000 feet. Even with the external omnidirectional antenna for 2 overlapping networks, 100% distance was gained, but still, that's only 2,000 feet. The 5 ghz solution is over 75% of that, with no exterbal antenna yet.

What am I missing? Is there something with the power requirements and output that makes 2.4 ghz better? 6 mbit at 1600 feet sounds better than 1,000 feet and 1 mbit.

Why products are insecure

[billstewart]

Cell phones, cordless phones, wireless networking, etc. should all use strong encryption, yet none of them do?

Sometimes you have to attribute it to malice, sometimes to stupidity, sometimes to changes in technology.

• Analog cellphones were too early, and you need to digitize data to do effective encryption. Analog cordless phones have the same problem, plus they're trying to be cheap.
• Digital cellphones are primarily weak because of malice - the US government armtwisted the US TDMA and CDMA standards committees into using obnoxiously weak encryption, with the leverage that crypto export laws could be used to prevent them from selling profit-making cell site equipment internationally and getting cheap handsets made internationally.
  
• The European GSM primary encryption algorithm A5/1 is technically incompetent, and doesn't have enough bits in the encryption keys, but as Goldberg et al. discovered, it's further weakened by setting 10 of its bits to all-zeros. And the alternate encryption algorithms designed for non-politically-connected countries are even weaker. The algorithm incompetence could have been prevented by developing it in public, with some competent peer review, but the demands for secrecy blocked it - as anybody in the crypto business knows, that's a big lose.
  
• Anything using 40 or 64 bit crypto is limited by US export laws (either current at the time the stuff was designed, or obsolete but old habit.)
  
• 56-bit DES encryption used to be adequate technology, but reality caught up with them. Unfortunately, it does enough slow bit-twiddling that the triple-DES variation, which is strong enough for anything, is too slow for many high-speed applications unless you add appropriate hardware implementations or a fast CPU. Also, there are applications that only use 56-bit single-DES for US export law reasons (again, generally no longer applicable, but some countries also restrict imports.)
  
• Any current 128-bit symmetric algorithm is strong enough (though some of them use MD5 hashes to generate keys, and those are looking technically shaky - but you can avoid that.) IDEA had minor patent problems (but Ascom-tech was friendly about free licenses for non-commercial use, and reasonably priced for commercial use.)
  
• RC4 encryption has a few simple rules about using it safely, like "never use the same key twice" and "if you're using it to XOR with your plaintext, make sure to design your application so it doesn't give away information." That's what killed Microsoft PPTP, and it's one of the problems with WEP. No malice, just incompetence.
  
• Authentication is hard. Sure, the RSA algorithm provides some of the fundamental tools, and now that the patent's expired it's easier to use them, but if you want to limit access to authenticated authorized users, you have to solve the problem of deciding who's authorized to do what, how to authenticate that they are, and how to distribute the data to enforce it. This is where many systems choke. Do you need PKIs? Do you want to distribute shared secrets? Do you want to allow promiscuous connections from anybody driving by with am 802.11b in their laptop and still have something you call security?
  
• The market is usually more concerned about authentication than privacy. Not too many people eavesdrop on cellphone calls for the content, compared to the likelihood that if a bad authentication method makes it easy for Bad Guys to clone your cellphone and make $500 calls to Bolivia which you'll refuse to pay The Phone Company for, so that's where the emphasis is. Privacy is important to some users (and there are things many people won't talk about over cellphones), but if it doesn't leak password information it's often just not a priority.
  
• Add your own issues here. There are lots of them...
  

Re:Why products are insecure

[geekoid]

Analog cellphones were too early, and you need to digitize data to do effective encryption. Analog cordless phones have the same problem, plus they're trying to be cheap.

wrong.
AAMOF, Analog can be "encrypted" far more difficult to break. The equipment and skill to break it is far more costly, and it has to be hardware, so you would have to by equipment just for breaking the encryption.
That means your going to eliminate the ability to download and run a program that will break the encryption. You'll have to download a design, buy specific equipment, build it(as in soldiering, not as in assembly). that take a much more commited intelligent, and financed person.

Wiring / Managing Offices Costs Money Too

[billstewart]

Sure, if you're trying to connect a couple of machines in the same room at home, $200 and even $100 card are a toy, though connecting machines on different floors of a house may or may not be easy.

But offices are much different - wiring cubicles for Cat5 and running it back to a phone closet costs money, and hubs that can provide management services (for lots of users) as opposed to simple dumb hubs also costs money, and reconnecting the things every time you play the Shrinking Cubicle Space Game costs money. Especially now that wireless cards are $100 heading for ~$50, and good laptop 100baseT cards are $40, if you're not loading your network heavily, wireless is a big win.

It's not as strong a case if you're in a file-server-intensive environment, but for typical corporate use, 10 Mbps is enough for a lot of users doing email, printing, and web browsing plus their desktop-based apps. (Of course you'd run 100Mbps for a wired network, now that it's as cheap as 10Mbps.)

Wireless is also a really convenient approach for office telephones, as long as they don't interfere with wireless data connections, cell phones, microwave ovens, .... Eliminating Moves/Adds/Changes for phones is a big win.

Re:Wiring / Managing Offices Costs Money Too

[gorilla]

But offices are much different - wiring cubicles for Cat5 and running it back to a phone closet costs money,

But every business has already bitten that cost, and loosing uptime & performance because there is a loose connection in the elevator motor costs an enormous amount of time. To my mind

2X mode does not use compression

[Anonymous Coward]

The Proxim 2X mode "bonds" two channels together; it doesn't use compression.

What's your network design like?

[billstewart]

If you're having problems at 11Mbps, and they're not just bad radio giving you heavy packet losses, something's wrong with your Outlook configuration or the networks supporting it.

My building has 100Mbps LAN, though my laptop currently has a 10Mbps card since the 100Mbps dongle broke (:-), but the connection to the outside world is only a T1 (1.5Mbps, symmetric), and it's more than enough bandwidth to get huge Powerpoint presentations from those marketing folks at headquarters.

And red hat still won't support it

[stonecoldt]

Wireless is mainstream now and they're coming out with the next generation, and Red Hat/Mandrake/etc *still* hasn't caught up. Why can't red hat detect my 18 month old Wavelan card and give me the options to configure it properly on install? Instead, it's a weeklong nightmare of scouring the internet looking for responses to messages like "help! Here are my error messages, how do i get this to work?". Laptop + wireless + linux would be the perfect mobile terminal if they could just get their act together. This new release shows just how far behind they are.

Re:And red hat still won't support it

[simong]

Mandrake 8.0 works for me with my SMC 2632W Intersil PRISM based card - PCMCIA detects it as wlan and it Just Works, albeit without WEP. To build it the correct drivers, you need the kernel source RPM, PCMCIA-CS source for your build and the driver source from The Linux WLAN Project. It's a bit labourious to do first time but once it's done it works perfectly.

If everyone used TRANSPORT MODE ipsec....

[maynard]

...we would all share and enjoy secure communication. Everyone focuses on Tunnel Mode ipsec without paying attention to other possibilities in the specification. Linux FreeS/WAN, the BSD's, and even Win2K all support both Tunnel and Transport Mode ipsec, why don't more people use this stuff? Though, honestly, why the FreeW/AN folks don't use a standard IKE daemon for key exchange is beyond me....

I guess we'll all have to wait for IPV6 before this stuff becomes ubiquitous. But there's really no reason why an end user need worry about secure communications across the internet. If everyone had the infrastructure (local daemons) for key exchange and ipsec it would be entirely hidden from the user and totally secure point to point. No more need for wrapping various protocols through SSL pipes... which is an obnoxious hack IMO. The ipsec guys have it right. Setting up a secure communication point to point should be completely transparent to the end user, and given ubiquitous support ipsec would be just that simple.

So your "Average Joe" argument is worthless. Your second argument about securing local systems is beside the point and not relevant to secure communications across an insecure network. Your third point that there is already a huge installed base of IPV4 systems without ipsec support is, unfortunately, the truth. The point that "there is more to the world than IP" is yet another meaningless statement. There is more to the world than a woman, beer, and dinner. But I'm not about to turn down dinner with Guinness and a date anytime soon.

JMO,
--Maynard

close indeed!

[itronix]

um...these run at around 5 gigahertz(centimeter range wavelength) compared to 1000 gigahertz(nanometer range wavelength), where infra-red light starts...I wouldn't say that was "very close"...

Obsolete? Maybe not. Affordable? Hopefully.

[itronix]

The only reason that I'm even the least bit excited about 802.11a is that I'm hoping it will lower the price of 802.11b and my broke ass might finally be able to afford some wireless gear. Since I'm not a Bleeding-edge fanatic and my bandwidth requirements are slim, 802.11b would be PLENTY for surfing, reading email and occasionally downloading a file or two. I'm looking forward to someday seeing prices comparable to cat5 hardware....ah, that'd be nice....

Minimal service level

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that has bothered me about 802.11 has been that it doesn't draw a very distinct line at the minimum quality of service.

Try this: FTP a very large file from your laptop to your desktop via 802.11. Then, pick up the laptop and being walking away from the desktop. Watch your transfer rate begin to recede. Eventually, you'll reach a zone where connectivity is indeterminate - sometimes you have it, sometimes you don't.

This can be hell when developing devices that need to automatically negotiate with servers when you get within range. Imaging opening a socket, getting a successful connect, and then as soon as you transfer, having a read fail. And then, a read success. And then another fail. Too many error conditions.

Somewhere, either in the hardware or at the driver level, a certain level of service quality must be guaranteed before any connectivity is granted. Doing so will also force hardware hawkers to stop touting a 250' range when the real usable range is more like 75'.

5 Ghz sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

The higher the frequency, the worse performance you get when trying to operate through obstacles and walls. I'd rather have 1000' range and 256 kbps than 50' and 5 MBps.

Imagine the Aibo possibilities!

[Anonymous Coward]

If they can put an 802.11a device in Aibo, then the little guys can play with each other by "talking". It would be very cute to see Aibo's intelligently interacting with each other.

Also, you could remotely program an Aibo to lick peanut butter off your balls.

802.11b may now be cheaper.

[jquirke]

Whether you think 802.11a's offerings are useful or not, it will be still be a great thing for 802.11b - which is far from obselete.

As most people are arguing, the capabilities (primarily bandwidth) offered by 802.11b are still suitable for many people. Now, with the introduction of 802.11a products, the prices of 802.11b will be reduced, as many organizations and users dump their 802.11b gear, as well as the price of brand new equipment falling.

A similar thing happened with 802.11 -> 802.11b, except in those days 802.11 was no where near as widespread as 802.11b is now.

Re:Laptop speeds limited - BS

[laptop006]

On my network it's the server that's the limiting factor. It only has a 200Mhz processor with 64MB and a dodgy ethernet card talking to old & slow hard drives. My laptop can easily push 50Mbit through it's Intel (micro)PCI card. Even talking to that server I get over 25mbit. So you're using a very F'd laptop. My own is quite dodgy. However I've never used 802.11(a/b) so I can't say.

Enough!

[hyrdra]

"11 Mbps should be enough for anyone, forget 802.11a." -- Slashdot posts, 2001.

extra: Wireless standards (names) & SMC turbo?

[cneo]

To differentiate the IEEE 802.11b from the IEEE 802.11a standards for the less-apt consumer, WECA has decided to create Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi5:

http://www.80211-planet.com/news/article/0,4000, 14 81_921691,00.html

Also, I see alot of company site's making 802.11 announcements (Intel, 3com, linksys, etc), but something I noticed at SMC's site

http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?action=products_sho w_ product&productcode=SMC2755W

is that their announcement states that their wireless accesspoint operates at 7ghz!!! in "turbo mode" creating 72mbps bandwidth! How come only SMC has this nifty "turbo mode"? Most of the other companies seem ready to launch mostly next year, but SMC is taking orders now at certain websites?!?!

10mbps?

[dalinian]

Come on, seriously... alot of us are still on 10mbps connections to the Internet.

Don't push it. I'm using a 28.8kbps modem. :-)

Don't need high speed, need many low speed connect

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does everyone care about faster faster
faster in connections?
The enduser should access his/her needs
and do what makes sense for the type of
links that they need to make.

The topology of networks and connections
doesn't need to have every connection
be fast. Some NEED to be slow to prevent
buffer overload. As a witness to this
try hitting submit twice in less than ten
seconds on the Slash-Dot input page.
The server kicks back and gives you
a 'wow, cowboy' type of message.

Hence the communications chip industry
is lost in the 'mine is bigger' syndrome
thinking that faster data is better data.

What we really need are chips that allow
deterministic connections with known and
given bandwidth and a methodology of
connecting these data streams to processes
running in the real world.

I don't need a tetrabit connection. I probably
won't ever need that. But maybe I need
a million megabite connections!

Can Intell give me that reliably and
in a deteriministic fashion?
I bet that they can't yet.

Competition

[wbaustin]

Proxim Cards are also available and access points should be out next week.

"The new Skyline 802.11a CardBus Card and Access Point are fully compliant with the IEEE 802.11a standard and also feature Proxim's 2X(TM) mode, which enables connection speeds up to 108 Mbps. "

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wirelesslan/message/ 2461

And Gino says the following:

"Re: 802.11a Basics- Shipping

I have Proxim 802.11a cardbus cards on stock....

need any?

AP will ship next week..

Gino"

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wirelesslan/message/ 2457

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Hope it drives down prices

[Lumpy]

802.11b is plenty fast enough... for me anyways.
Hopefully it drives the 802.11 equipment prices way down so I can expand my public wireless node coverage. and possibly set up more point-2-point wireless links. (486 laprops are basically free but 2 wireless cards is danged expensive, then mods for external antennas, etc...)

Hopefully I'll see some Sub $50.00USD wireless cards available sometime soon... or maybe a native PCI wireless card with Rf connector that is actually supported in linux.

Defense In Depth

[thayner]

Having security built into 802.11 is a good thing as long as it isn't the only thing going. It adds a layer of security which even if broken is still likely to add difficulty to breaking into a system, and additionally if say IPSEC is broken next week then the encryption used by 802.11 will keep the network safer then it would be if there was no encryption at all.

Re:Defense In Depth

[cduffy]

Well... maybe.

Having multiple layers of defense is absolutely a Good Thing.

Having some of those layers be built into low-level protocols (and thus providing a non-negotiable layer of overhead) is not necessarily a Good Thing.

I'd say that having application-level security on top of the IPSec would be the next appropriate layer, as opposed to adding another layer below.

Cost

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.streetprices.com/Electronics/SP619941.h tml

$200 for a gateway and a pc card?
How much lower do you need?

Latency?

[Explo]

Does anyone have links to measurements of the latency of this wacky new hardware? The existing 802.11 stuff has quite a lot more latency than traditional wired stuff, will it be improved?

What about the ISP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Broadband is in troubled times, DSL providers aren't making a profit, T1 lines are still around $600 USD a month, etc, etc....don't disregard the dire state of broadband in this country.

The cost of wireless devices is only half of the problem.

Re:Cost issues

[Felinoid]

I hear this all the time.. and not just of Linux...
There are people absolutly convenced that you need to be a total geek to use a Mac... You try convencing them otherwise.
There are reasons why they think this some of them I won't get into..
But the primary reason is the person was told so by a person who never used the Mac.

Linux has the same problem only a lot more of it.
Most of us would laugh off the clame for Mac but the same clame made of Linux is believed.

This story starts when a person has a problem with a system. We've all heard how only a 15 year old can set a VCR clock. If you can set your own watch you can set a VCR clock.. People trying often do it when they don't have the time to learn and set themselfs up for failure.

Same for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Then the story speads...
With Mac the story is laughed at.. "Jo thinks Mac is hard... ha ha ha"
With Linux the story is believed..."Ask Jo about how hard Linux is... he knows"

Jo is just relaying what he heard.

Then you have the 15 year old who never heard this. He installs Linux no problem.
The diffrence is he dosn't know it's hard. He gives himself time just like he dose for everything becouse his parents insist on it. It's the only way he'll learn anything.

Then later he discovers what he dose in his sleep others find imposable. He must be really smart. Wow...

Those people annoy Solarus and BSD admin who do exactly the same thing every day. They do even more. They know more than the avrage 15 year old 31337 know it all Linux user. So when someone comes off with the "I use Linux so I'm smart" addatude they get really mad.

Any idiot can use Linux. The learning curve is inflated.

I know this is a troll.. He makes some really big unfounded clames.
But the one that is believable is the "Linux is hard" clame and thats one people make a lot with out actually being a troll.
So there you have it...

But I'll close with this....
"any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc."
Is going to be disapointed no matter what they get.

Everyone lacks something on that list..

Uhh

[mindstrm]

Yeah.. you aren't aware you can amplify a received signal as well?

Wanted: 802.xx wireless ISP network setup help

[netheadglenn]

My company is trying to start a small wireless ISP in a developing country. The plan is to purchase "bulk" bandwidth, and share it over wireless networks using the 802.11 (or similar) protocol. At our location, 6 people sharing a 64kbps line is considered broadband. Believe it or not, that is the wireless connection that we will offer. We need help with every technical aspect of setting this up. Our goal is to reduce hardware costs to an absolute minimum. To do so our idea is to make linux routers out of older used computers. Our available radio frequency is anywhere between 3.7 and 4.2 Mhz. I understand that this frequency is good for non-line-of-sight use. We can use a fair bit of power here, as regulation is lax and as flexible as currency. We will start by offering service within a 10 mile radius of our server. After that we will want to provide access to two cities that are each roughly 20 miles away. What equipment do we need to purchase/make? Exactly how do we program the hubs? What antennas do we need? How many clients can we have on one central server? How do we go about sharing bandwidth properly? What questions have I not thought of? Basically, we need someone to tell us step by step in detail how to do this, and to help us as we set up our 1st few customers. Free advice is hugely welcome and will surely provide you with baskets of good karma. I also have this question posted on elance at http://www.elance.com/c/rfp/main/jobDesc.pl?jobId= 5788011 and http://www.elance.com/c/rfp/main/jobInfo.pl?jobId= 5788011&catId=10222