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

graceful fade

[goombah99]

If am interpreting this correctly, then this is saying that apples will communicate with extreme cards at the full data rate and the b-cards at the lower data rate. as you add more b-cards naturally the throughtput of the system goes down.

this makes perfect sense from a bandwidth slice point of view. if each card is getting an equal fraction of bandwidth (or time or whatever) and the b- cards are only exploiting that bandwidth at their normal 11MB/s flux then well yes they are wasting bandwith (but thats becasue they are B-cards).

the transmitter is still jamming bits as fast as it can, it just cat jam them as fast to the B-cards

of course a better situation would be if the bandwidth could be shared better so the b-cards got a smaller slice. but I doubt the b-cards would work that way.

Re:graceful fade

[Anonymous Freak]

No, it says that a single .11b card on your mostly .11g network will make the entire network (all clients) drop to .11b speeds.

This is common of all .11g implementations I have seen so far. So, for example, if/when I go to .11g in my home, I'll have 54Mbps. But, if my neighbor, who is using .11b, happens to get near enough with his laptop to connect to my network (happens all the time right now, he hooks onto mine, I hook onto his,) then all of MY computers will drop to 11Mbps, just because one single .11b client has connected to the base station.

So, when I go .11g, I guess I'll have to lock my neighbor out. (Too bad, in my neighborhood, we've got about 5 WAPs within 6 houses of each other, and we all leech off each other, as some of us connect to our neighbor's WAP better than to our own at certain points of our property.)

Re:fine print

[quintessent]

For those not privy to Apple-specific jargon:
Airport==802.11b
Airport Extreme==802.11g

Bad moderator

[quintessent]

This was not redundant.