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Linksys Shows Off New Products To SOCALWUG
John Hering writes "Last night at the Southern California Wireless Users Group (SOCALWUG) meeting, a representative from Linksys, a division of Cisco Systems, presented several new never-before-seen Linksys products which including a wireless-G range extender, a wireless switch, wireless network attached storage and even a new Boingo co-branded wireless-G router which will serve as an off-the-shelf hotspot solution. It's interesting to note how the new Linksys products continue to look more and more like Cisco products."
Cisco's stuff may be nearly bulletproof, but the damn things take forever to power on. A 350 AP or BR can easily take over 3 minutes to boot. I really hope that they can find a way around boot speed issues. The public at large will not be as willing to wait as a network admin.
For LinkSYS to support WPA in AP-AP (Wireless Bridge) mode on their WAP54G.
"Note:WPA does not work in Wireless Bridge mode in this release"
Dammit people, WHEN will you get it right?
We don't need no stinkin NEW Products, we need completed features in our firmware for existing products.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Sounds like an interesting concept, but I wonder how it will scale...
Assuming single-channel G/B operation, the best it could do is divide G/B users into three distinct segments (three non-overlapping frequency ranges at best). With this lack of flexibility a switched architecture seems not to yield much benefit... In fact, the alternitive use of overlapping channels to increase the overall 'bus' of the netork (the dual channel 108 mbps devices') seems more beneficial. If the net is only segmented into 3 segments, best case, and any given two hosts on the network communicate, there is a 33% chance they are on the same segment anyway, and the switched benefit isn't had. With dual channel, single segment, sure there is a 100% chance for contention in that case, but far more bandwidth available, and much better performance in wireless to lan communication (which is 98% of usage anyway).
Of course, it could be different from what I'm picturing, maybe it is more akin to a managed hub, where packets are only retransmitted to each host on 'switch-like' rules, but it remains the standard single-media solution. Perhaps kept very switchlike by different encryption keys per host, but ultimately the media is still shared in a hub fashion, so the typical network performance benefits of switched ethernet networks are not there to be had.. Of course, more intelligently handling mixed B/G devices could be the case, which would be a good thing..
Anyone know any more details about what they are meaning by a 'switched wireless network'? It certainly could be an interesting concept if the standard had more non-overlapping channels...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm glad to see they seem to have dumped that horrible design they had.
But more importantly, it looks like this will make what I wanted possible:
Wireless switching with the Linksys WET54GS5 Wireless Ethernet Switch:
- Managed Ethernet switch
- Wireless supports virtual LANs (VLAN)
- Supports up to 69 VLAN users
- Each wireles suser gets a separate Subnetted IP address
- Targeted release June 2004
This should enable you to share your wireless Internet access, without opening up your own network to strangers.
The SAN device looks cool - it appears to be a device that makes any USB mass storage device appear as a network drive. I wonder if it shows up as a windows file server, nfs server, or a network attached block device? Can two computers use it simultaneously? Does anyone else make something similar?
-jim