Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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*
Its a shame none of you have done your homework. Ill probably come off sounding like an Apple Fanboy, but I am far from it. The Apple Airport Extreme 802.11g Base stations handle both B and G, AT THE SAME TIME. The base station dosent ignore one card, while providing to the other, nor does it throttle down speeds to the G cards when the B cards are around. It throttles down speed for the B cards only. Between me, my roomate, and best friends, we have an iBook, with a B card in it, a G4 Powerbook with a G card in it, and an extreme base station. Everything works. The Powerbook fly's with its G card, and my iBook gets throttled down automatically. The new Airports are backwards compatible. They support both B and G. They dont support A, but Apple never did. So ill just smile and keep on surfing down at my local hot spot, enjoying my iBook, knowing that im not messing with anyones connection. Start doing your homework before you sling some mud. Thanx
I'd suggest you take a look at the specs again. I and quite a few others know by experience the problems with 802.11b units in 802.11g airspace.
Betting your ibook with 802.11b is actually logging into another wireless network somewhere close by. No other 802.11g station has been able to pull this one off, care to explain how apple achieve a 'miracle'?
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
Do your own homework: straight from apple.
In the fine print at the bottom (footnote 3):
"To achieve maximum speed of 54 Mbps the wireless network may only have AirPort Extreme-enabled computers on it."
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.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
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!
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.
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.