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

Will US Robotics step up again?

[Anonymous Coward]

They became famous for their "v.Everything" modems, which allowed you to basically connect to any other type of modem, even with bad line conditions. Could they produce an 802.11Evertyhing? It could talk to all these incompatible "standards" and sell well to higher end consumers who need guaranteed connectivity.

fine print

[Bizzarobot]

Little "(2)" at the bottom of the page says:

(2) Based on IEEE 802.11g draft specification. Data rates greater than 11 Mbps require an AirPort Extreme Base Station, an AirPort Extreme Card, and an AirPort Extreme-ready computer. To achieve maximum speed of 54 Mbps, all users must use AirPort Extreme Cards. Actual speed will vary based on range, connection rate, and other factors

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.

News for nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, this was in the reg seven days ago. Maybe it should be in the "olds for nerds" section instead? (Sorry, couldn't resist)

Apple says

[Knytefall]

"When one or more 802.11b users connect, the wireless network begins to decrease its maximum data rate to accommodate them. When many 802.11b users are active on the wireless network, the overall network data rate begins to approximate 802.11b rates."

See the "Airport Extreme Technology Overview" at the bottom of this page.

802.11g on pc's / linux =/

[NivenHuH]

I wasn't able to find any cards out on the market that'll work under Linux.. Most of them use the Broadcom chipset (or a newer rev of the prism chipset) that doesn't work with the existing prism drivers out there.. =/ I tried to toy around with the Linksys "54g" card.. but.. ended up giving up and brought it back.

*shrug* I figure I'll just wait the 4 months until 802.11g is out of draft and is actually standardized.. People are saying there will be flash updates for the cards.. but.. *shrug* I don't trust word of mouth too much..

Works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a Buffalo 802.11g Air Station for my house that delievered a 4x speed increase over 802.11b. When My wife comes online with her Apple laptop using 802.11b the speed does drop back to 802.11b but since we are hardly ever on at the same time this isn't a problem. I still enjoy the faster speeds and Buffalo has a guarentee that they will upgrade or replace all hardware to meet the standards when they become ratified. Till then i'm enjoying a preview and lovin it...

Re:This is funny...

[SeattleDave]

My 12PB works great running against my Buffalo Tech WiFi base station and high-gain attenna. How many people really need the faster throughput? 11Mbs seemed fine before the PB arrived with the extreme card and it feels fine now. How many people are buying this stuff to run directly against their DSL or Cable. Let's see... 54Mb/s right up to the goofy router and then, wham, back to 1Mbs/128Kbs down/up.

The advantage of the new PowerBook like isn't really with the "g" - it's with the great attenna placement. My signal strength has never been better.

11b devices work fine in my 11g network

[JungleBoy]

I have a Linksys 11g Access Point. There are about 7 11b users (mostly linksys pc cards and usb adapters). I use a powerbook (12inch) with the 11g card, and everything seems to play nice in that network. The powerbook always connects at 54, though the acctual throughput never gets close to that (I test with iperf). The 11b clients don't seem to affect the 11g client.

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

this article is complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

This article has so many errors in it I don't know where to start.

It says that because of incompatibilities between 11g implementations the IEEE was "forced" to decide between them. WRONG!!! The decision on a final IEEE 11g standard has had the SAME EXACT schedule for the last year per the association's roadmap. And, as the article DOES NOT SAY, the IEEE gave approval to a draft last week, RIGHT ON SCHEDULE. See http://www.80211-planet.com/news/article.php/15847 61 for the complete story. The only sensationalism here is for ignorant reporters being used by vendors who want to inject some controvery into a very technical process.

The Register really botched this story. Big time.

Re:this article is complete bullshit

[binaryDigit]

Not saying anything about the correctness of the Reg article or of your assesment of it. HOWEVER, you use an example of them claiming the IEEE being "forced" to make a decision, you state that statement is incorrect, and then offer up a couple of examples of how the IEEE was on schedule. What does one have to do with the other? How does the IEEE being on schedule relate to them being "forced" into a choice? Do you have more info to clarify your point?

Arbitrary naming

[elliotj]

Naming conventions for networking standards are all over the map: airport, airport extreme, wifi etc.

You'd think it would just be simpler to use the 802.xyz definition because at least that's a version number.

Oh yeah, except 802 isn't even a version number. The first meeting of the IEEE Computer Society "Local Network Standards Committee", Project 802, was held in February of 1980. It was called 802 for the second month of 1980.

So all these things are pretty arbitrary. Personally, I think networking standards should be named Uhura.

Opposite but similar problem with Airport

[adzoox]

I service a large advertising firm - all computers are Macs (Mostly PowerMac G3 Blue/Whites & iMac CRTs 4 G4 Graphites, one Cube, one PowerBook Titanium, one PowerBook G3) - all of these machines have Airport Cards (802.11b) - I purchased an Airport Extreme Base station for this client. All machines worked fine with the 802.11b - just as before with Snow BaseStation 2.0 they had previously.

This client decided to put a PC on the network along with several networked printers. All networked printers worked fine with current Macs utilizing the "802.11b part" of the Airport Extreme (802.11b/802.11g hybrid)

The PC, with a Linksys 802.11g card didn't like the network - while it saw the network and Macs saw it, no connection could be made to the internet via AE BaseStation t1 internet.

I called Linksys, and they said, "At the moment, the Linksys 802.11g (which includes a new implementation of 802.11b) was only compatible with other Linksys equipment". Phone support managed to help me get the 802.11b working. I was transferred to a tech where discussed timeframes and support. I was told that Linksys is actually working with Apple to make a standard since more people initially will buy Airport Extreme. I was told to expect a flash updater for both units by the middle of March.

This is what happens

[bitty]

This is what happens when you let your marketing department make technical decisions. And don't feed me the "if you don't jump on it early, you'll lose market share" bit. That may be true at first, but if someone buys a product that turns out to be totally incompatible with everything down the road, do you really think they're going to buy or recommend another product from that manufacturer?

This is going to do nothing but piss a lot of people off and make even more think that .11g sucks ass due to bad word-of-mouth.

A little more about 802.11g

[chriso11]

What is 802.11g? It is a mix of 802.11b and 802.11a.

802.11b, the commonly seen version, runs at 2.4GHz, just like Bluetooth. Why? Because 2.4GHz is the natural resonance frequency of water, which is the frequency of microwave ovens. So 2.4GHz was left open years ago, because nobody thought it would be any use (a 1KW noise source could completely swamp out the 1nW power of a tranmsitted frequency).

802.11b uses a digital modulation scheme called CCK, which is basically a fluffed up version of QPSK. 802.11a uses a more advanced modulation format called OFDM, but at 5.2GHz. OFDM is better able to operate in an environment with multiple reflections, but requires a much more complicated modulator/demodulator. But the complexity gets about 5x the data rate in the same bandwidth.

802.11g was a higher data rate version of 802.11b. Texas Instruments had proposed to use a data format called PBCC to get higher data rates than the CCK used in 802.11b. Intersil proposed to use the OFDM from 802.11a. A standards committee war started, and the end was TI lost. TI wanted PBCC because it was already working on a chipset that would support it, giving TI a great advantage. Of course, Intersil waas probably doing the same thing. When TI lost, it tried to do an end-run around the standard by releasing its chipset anyway. The Dlink plus series and USR 22MB/s Wireless components use the TI chipset.

EE Times weighs in, without the sensationalism

[daveschroeder]

In this article, EE Times looks at some of the same issues.

However, some of the same misinformation prevails:

And in an environment of mixed .11b and .11g basestations, Krewell said, clients will automatically default to the lower 11-Mbit/s bandwidth of .11b.

Not true on two counts.

First, the only reason that a/b access points don't do this is because they're basically two different access points in one box! If a b/g access point had essentially two access points - one b, and one g - within itself, it wouldn't need to scale back either! Which brings me to...

Second, g clients don't scale back to 11 when b clients are present. They will get slower, but only because of the way the packets are interspersed. When 802.11b is present on an interface where g is present, everything, including b clients, will slow a little bit; by about a third. But g clients will not slow to 11.

Also, Apple's equipment has the ability to force b or g only, if needed in a particular installation.

Ultimately, one Apple design manager said, chip sets will support all three WLAN standards, eliminating any conflicts. Indeed, Intel intends to initially ship .11b chips for its Banias notebook platform, following that up with .11a/b combo chips within three months, and probably add support for .11g by the end of the year, Krewell said.

Looks to my like it'll be a wash in the end, and I'd rather have g, albeit a draft g, right now (which, if there are any changes, will most certainly be updated to the final g via a firmware update). I can still connect to all b access points, and have increased speed when connected to my g access point (connected via 100mbit ethernet) today.

Note: this was posted wirelessly over draft 802.11g-Draft6.

Extreme Base Station does not throttle down

[matt_maggard]

According to this Apple Knowledge Base article, the speed of the base station DOES NOT throttle when 11b users are connected.

It specifically says:

"Mixing clients on an AirPort Extreme network

When you mix 802.11b (AirPort) and 802.11g (AirPort Extreme) clients on an AirPort Extreme network, each type of client receives an appropriate data throughput rate. The 802.11g clients continue to receive data at a higher rate than 802.11b clients.'

The "little 2" is probably there so people don't think that when an 11b user is transfering files to an 11g user that the transfer will zoom along at 54mbs. In this scenerio, all user need to be extreme to get high speeds.