WiFi Woes With .11g

Herby Werby writes "The Register has an article on the incompatibility between .11g and .11b across differing unnamed vendors due to premature roll-outs. The part which really hurts is the suggestion that if there's a .11b participant to your .11g network then either it gets ignored or the network reverts to .11b status. Anyone tried this yet with their new Powermacs?" As the article points out, this is most likely due to the fact that .11g hasn't really even been set as a *standard* yet, so incompatibility is to be expected. I just hope vendors get really good with flash updates.

Comments

I'll tell yah in 7 weeks

[papasui]

thats how long my backorder on the 17" powerbook is. My concern with 802.11g is that it seems extremely distance limited, my dlink 614+ can push 22mbit over 2.4ghz, but it sucks because you need to be right next to the damn thing to get that much throughput. I'd rather have 11mbit and actually be able to get some distance with it.

Re:I'll tell yah in 7 weeks

[BWJones]

I'd rather have 11mbit and actually be able to get some distance with it.

So, the cool thing about "Airport Extreme" is that you can get 54mbit up close and personal, but as range increases and transfer rates decrease, you don't go below 11mbit. It's pretty cool actually as 11mbit is plenty fast for surfing the web and doing database searches, but it is tiresome for data transfers when one is used to the speed and convenience of Firewire. However, 54mbit speeds with Airport Extreme is not to bad for most backups in the under GB category.

Is it really as bad...

[JWizard]

...as the register makes it sound ? Obviously different standards will have at least some compatibility issues that need to be resolved, but it seems that the registers depicts it as a huge problem

Big jumping point from b to g ...

[timothy]

I have a wired + wireless router (one of the many little ones that Walmart / CompUSA / your local Lucky Dragon sell), and it's great, works with very little coaxing.

However, it also offers throughput on both the wired and unwired sides which is far greater than the bandwidth of my cable modem. For person-to-person communication (IRCing with your tenant in the basement, or even using VoIP if you're into that sort of thing) or moderate file exchanging, 11b is *plenty* until you get pretty far apart.

How often do you do large file transfers wirelessly so that you'd get a big benefit out of 11g? For some people that answer is going to be "All the time, thank you!" but for most residential wireless users, I think the answer is going to be "Large file transfers ...?"

Are there really compelling advantages to .11g which would make it worth buying -- for household use, that is -- over a ridiculously cheap 801.11b router? I guess at a frathouse (or a co-op), it would make more sense ...

timothy

11b works, 11g doesn't. Go figure.

[OS24Ever]

I have a Powerbook G4 Ti 550Mhz and an IBM Thinkpad T21.

I have an airport extreme wireless hub.

I have an Airport card in the Powermac. It works fine with the Airport Extreme (as one would expect).

I have an old 'IBM High Rate Wireless LAN' card which as I understand is a 40bit WEP compatible 802.11b card. It works fine.

So i bought a Linksys 802.11g card for my Thinkpad so I could at least use 128Bit WEP. I plug it in, and it don't work at all. It connects to the base station, but won't get an IP address. If you hard code an IP address it doesn't work either, but it sees the base station.

Of course I've worked on this for about 20 min, so I'm not finished yet. Not real thrilled with the 'ease of use' crap with Windows 200, wish it'd give more detail other than the pretty graphics.