Wireless Networking at 72Mbps

Unknown Relic writes "One of the biggest drawbacks to current wireless networking technologies is the limited connection speed. Well now LinkSys has released a new wireless access point which operates on the 5 GHz band, supports up to 72 Mbps connections and is fully interoperable with existing 802.11a wireless equipment."

Comments

Re:One of the biggest drawbacks?

[RGRistroph]

I would rather have 56k and be able to go a mile or two. If everyone could get devices of that range, we'd have to have each device have a lower bandwidth so we wouldn't crowd each other out; but more importantly peer-to-peer ad-hoc networks could give some telecos a run for their money.

Heck, I'd settle for 14.4k or 9600. Who the hell wants 1000 MB/s when you can only talk to yourself ?

Here is what I had to say to Linksys sales

[jmorris42]

To : sales@linksys.com
Subject : WAP54A & WPC54A

Ok, I just looked at the products in the subject line and have a question. Since when did "Compatible with Virtually All Major Network Operating Systems" get redefined to mean "Currently shipping versions of Windows?" You don't even support Win95, Win98 or WinNT. 98 & NT are officially still supported by Microsoft and certainly qualify as Network Operating Systems so your marketing department is officially full of BS. Trust is a valuable commodity to piss away on such an obvious and senseless lie.

I'm a current owner of a BEFW11S4 so I was sorta interested, but the only card the new access point talks to has no Linux drivers or tech specs posted to allow the creation of a driver. That kinda makes it useless to me. Come to think of it, there wasn't much in the way of technical details period. No details on what the actual native speed (data compression is cheating since most of my traffic is encrypted, etc.) of the card is, what ranges are usable at each datarate, etc.

Re:D-Link and Proxim

[Artifex]

It says it connects at 72 Mbps consistently

But is it consistently giving you that throughput?
And if it has to throttle down for momentary radio noise, does it have the ability to throttle back up quickly?

I'm just wondering - people with 56K modems often wonder why their connections are slow when they initially sync at high rates, and it's all about the adaptiveness to changing conditions. From what I hear, plain old 802.11b isn't so great at this... I hope this is better.