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Linksys Ships Dual-band, Tri-standard A+G Wireless
Anonymous Howard writes "Designtechnica has a news article about LinkSys shipping to market their new line of wireless dual-band, tri-standard A+G products. They support 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g simultaneously with speeds of up to 54mbps.
I could actually bring my laptop home and not have to switch my wireless card and settings! It comes at a pretty hefty price though, $299 for router and $279 for access point. I think my fingers could handle the exercise a bit longer until prices come down. Who here is willing to fork out that much for tri-band gear?" This is exactly what I've been looking for since I got an 802.11g wireless card. All of the 802.11g access points I've seen couldn't operate in 802.11g mode so long as older cards were in the area. Finally, I can upgrade my systems over time.
drivers. Drivers like the ones that Intersil seems to have for their Linux WLAN APs, but won't give any information to Linux wlan driver authors.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Yeah, and unfortunately this AP doesn't change that. That's the way the standard was written, and nowhere does Linksys claim to be able to perform such magic...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
The Apple AirPort Base Station can be set to operate exclusively in g speeds--it will ignore b clients. I dunno if this is a common or standard feature of g access points, but there you go.
OTOH, if you're looking for something that does both b and full-speed g at the same time, is that even technically possible? And no, I didn't RTFA. However, for instance the Apple base staion again--if it does both b and g, the g speed doesn't crash all the way back to b, but is rather diminished by about 1/2 of it's typical speed. YMMV depending on range and b/g client ratio, and what the different clients are accessing.
--
$tar -xvf
All those coffee shops and bookstores that want to offer wireless access to anyone can now rejoice.
...I'm still waiting for OS Drivers for my Ti ACX100 based Wifi Card.
Do not read this
Would be if you wanted to offer flexible wireless access in your business--say a coffee shop or something with a small number of users. You could support everybody, Apple, PC, whatever, and not have to worry about people bitching that their card "just doesn't work here."
Now show me a heavy-duty pro version of the tri-band wifi router and I'll be super interested.
Who did what now?
The wlan-ng project has early stage support for the wusb12 card.
More details available @ the Linux-USB device site.
Luckily they don't use the hideous Broadcom chipset, which still does not have Linux support, even though it's sold in Dell, Linksys, Belkin and Apple (new Powerbooks, anyone?) wireless products, to name but a few. *grr*
You are in your favorite coffee house, zipping along at G-speed, when some loser B-Card holder opens up that ancient Apple boat-anchor, and slams the whole building down to B-Speed.
We are looking at the new "smoker" to be admonished, segregated and finally kicked to the curb for daring to fuck with our precious bandwidth, the way that smokers fucked with our oxygen.
Soon, you will see them outside on the street, shivering in the cold, huddled together over warm repeater, taking digital drags of packets, polluting the internet environment with their dropped bits, and NAT requests.
Scorn them, outlaw them, as they fuck it up for the rest of us. Let them connect in their poor neighborhoods, where you can still see the bitches walking the streets crying "Hey Daddy, I'll suck your dick for an IP address. Hook a bitch up!"
Losers.
How many of you have a wireless network where you work? I dont..but most IBM consultants i meet carry laptops with wireless cards. Can i use a wireless network card with a wired network? That would be more useful, wouldn't it?
I have the Linksys dualband .a/.b access point. It is junk. After being on for about two days it drops the speed down to about 15KB/sec, or it just stops working at all. They have NEVER released a single firmware update for this AP since it was released.
.a gear but don't bother to tell you that it doesn't work under XP. The only spot they mention this is the last question on the FAQ included on the CD. D-Link had no problem supporting Turbo mode in XP on their cards.
Stay away from Linksys. I've since switched to D-Link and even put D-Link firmware on my Linksys WAP11s and they work so much better. I'm not constantly resetting them like I was before.
The Linksys NIC drivers are also bad. They promote Turbo mode on their
I hate apples. Macs suck, apples suck, they're overpriced and slow.
However all that said, their airport basestation still gives 802.11g laptops their full speed at the same time as 802.11b laptops work at their speed. The standard might not be written to support it, but the Airport Extreme in my dorm works fine simultaneously across TiBooks with G and thinkpads with B.
I used to have a Netgear WAB501 card. It got high praise from reviewers, so I figured why not. When I got the thing and started to look for Linux drivers, I noticed nobody gave a fuck about 802.11a chipsets, much less dual bands. There was one project that was in the early stages of a driver for a chipset whose number was close to mine, but it was already abandoned. So off it went back to buy.com.
Now I got me a Netgear MA401. Less than half the price, works every time, and it has a common chipset. It may be 'only' 11 mbps, but that's better than 0 mbps.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Get everyone who has a wifi card to chip in for a Access Point of your choice.Then plug the ethernet cable from your buisness into the Access Point. Bam, you have bridged your wired network to wifi.
You may want to ask your place of buisness, if they find out they could get mad. Going wifi *could* open you to some secruity issues. I'd suggest doing some research on wifi secruity.
RTFM not?
I would suggest you take your own advice, fool. Typical Mac Owner, content in their own ineptitute, happy to spend triple what the rest us pay for computing; hoping it will get them laid in the nuts and granola crowd they hang in.
Why dont you go shopping or something?
Anyone who is in a position to care about supporting three flavors of 802.11 is in a position to use linux as their solution. Unless you have a whole bunch of machines, this thing will do you no good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How is this off topic? I have been having the same problem too. There is no need to censor this.
Still waiting for a good .a or .g PCMCIA card for the Ti-Book. Anybody know of one?
Dell now offers a mini-pci card in their newest D series laptops that is a wireless a/b/g card...I realize that isn't router, but it's the only a/b/g card I've seen.
Having that kind of diversity in a card for your portable makes more sense to me then having that kind of diversity in your router.
Craenor
This access point isn't going to help you use both B and G on it's own..
Unfortunately, it is part of the standard that a G class access point will drop down to B if it sees any B style encoding.
You can work arround this by setting the configuration of (most) APs to completely IGNORE B, but that's not very friendly.
One solution, and the solution I recommend in the case where you REALLY want to have G out there, is to configure a "B" base station on one channel (1), and a G base station on another (6). Configure the G channel with a different SSID and hard-configure it not to drop down.
You now have a G only system available, and older B users are still capable of associating.
I would also point out that you must also hard code your adapter to run in only G-- it also will follow the standard and drop down.
Frankly, in my personal opinion, you're better off buying a combo A/B access point and also a combo A/B card. Both are significantly cheaper, and the A standard is also significantly FASTER in real-world performance (to the tune of 2-5x better REAL throughput compared to G.)
Good luck!
There is no problem. All reports of problems are rumors spread by the coalition forces of trolls. I am not afraid to post and neither should you be!
Who here is willing to fork out that much for tri-band gear?
Maybe, you should ask that question in some other article...one that discusses tri-band gear instead of dual-band.
Both the WPC55AG and WMP55AG adapters are based on Broadcom's chips. As well, both the WPC54G and WMP54G also use Broadcom's chips. There are no public linux drivers for this chip as of yet. From what I've read, the WRT and WAP products also use the Broadcom chips, but since they require no client drivers, it is a non-issue. What I find interesting is that these access points run embedded linux, which means that there is linux code out there for talking to these chips.
If you don't believe me about the chips, look at the photos of the internals of these things. They can be found in the FCC database here.
I made the mistake of purchasing the WAP54G and WPC54G products without checking for linux support. It had been so long since it was an issue that I had forgotten to check.
A few weeks ago, CompUSA was selling the Linksys 802.11g card that works in the TiBook for $60. I'm using it right now, along with the driver hack here and I like it not only for the 802.11g but for the fact that it increases signal strength relative to the internal TiBook airport card by about a factor of 2 or 3. It uses the same BroadCom chipset that Apple calls "Airport Extreme" and Buffalo and D-Link also make cards which use this chip as well.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Cisco has not only drivers for linux but also their config tools: cisco Aironet 350 linux drivers
Cisco Aironet 5 GHz 54 Mbps Wireless LAN Client Adapter 802.11a cards don't mention linux drivers on the data sheet, but hopefully they will soon.
If you're interested in linux and 802.11 stuff check out linux wlan project and wlan resources for linux
I hope somebody from their side is reading this, because its a PITA for customers to not get what they want.
There is no patch for stupidity
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Don't forget D-Link. DWL-650 and DWL-650+ are completely different chips as well.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
So wait..does this mean if I have a A+G card in my laptop that I could get 100mbit wireless by maxing out both connections?
It would be awesome if Linksys could rig it so that their cards could saturate both spectrums simultaneously as though it was one single connection.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
Anyone notice that the WAP54G and WRT54G run *Linux*, net Linksys hasn't released the source code to the kernels?
I wonder if these run Linux as well... Linux everywhere!
The linksys Wireless-G Access point or router which is very cheap, sub 150 bucks, can do both 802.11g and 802.11b at the same time, you don't need to shell out extra for the 802.11a feature, just a note to the editor.