802.11g... It's Official

JoeBuck writes "This article in CommsDesign reports that the IEEE has officially approved the IEEE 802.11g standard, as well as another standard (802.15.3) for shorter-range, very-low-power operation. Two other standards designed to improve compatibility between different vendors' access points were also approved."

Comments

compatability with current products?

[EyeSavedLatin]

An important question that I didn't see adressed in the article is what about products that are out now? Is the standard significantly different than, for example, apple's airport extreme? Being involved in the communications industry I know standards basically come down to which company wins the "no let's do it my way" fight (e.g. the cat 6 cable standard). Who was the winner in this case?

Any prism chipset 802.11g cards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, are there any 802.11g Prism chipset based cards? (read -- supported by Linux). How about wireless sniffer support? (read -- war driving).

Whoops, here is the rest of my message

[JoeBuck]

When lots of people are using the same access point, the bottleneck isn't the wireless rate, it's the connection from the base station to the network.

You're always free to wait

[squarooticus]

However, people (like myself) who want to take a gamble on buying technology that could shortly be obsolete should be able to. It's called capitalism, and such first adopters are the primary reason technological innovation is profitable.

Re:Device makers are too quick to market?

[adolf]

If people stopped going down to Fry's and buying wireless routers which utilize unratified almost-standards, manufacturers would stop trying to sell them because there'd be no profit potential.

Which is also to say that if everyone stopped buying non-standard gear, only standardized gear would exist.

Meanwhile, your DVDs are safe. With the massive investment people have in the software, which they'd presumably like to keep using, it would be foolish for manufacturers to stop selling players, because the money from replacement players flows in like water.

How many people get rich? Not you - you're obviously not in the hardware business. Pick a a number and subtract 1 for yourself.

300 feet

[poptones]

300 foot wireless range is abysmal? As a rural dweller I agree it ain't gonna do much to help me pull in broadband from the nearest town, but - how many houses do you presently have wired together with cat5?

Re:Hardware Treadmill

[Anonymous Coward]

When they did that with modems the O.S. community cried foul. Now your suggesting it be done again?

If the Linux community couldn't manage to write a soft ("win") modem driver in less than 2 years, what luck do you think they'd have with writing and rewriting anything 2.4g?

I'm being smart-mouthed about my answer I know, but this has happened before and the community reaction was violent negativity (It required writing code). :(