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What To Do With Old 802.11b Equipment?
CyberSlugGump writes "I am trying to declutter, and I have come across my cheap, off-brand, consumer-grade 802.11b wireless routers, PCMCIA cards, and USB adapters. The routers would still be good as 4-port 100Mb switches, and the other devices have at least 32-bit Windows XP drivers available. However, lack of security beyond WEP and the age of the equipment makes me wonder if it is worth any time putting it to use."
However, I think the reply to is "trash them". I'm probably not using my imagination enough, so I'm eager to read to suggestions of others. I'm a tech dumpster-diver and even I had to up my standards regarding equipment. With computers, I won't take anything less than 1Ghz++ AMD XP or P-IV, preferably with DDR RAM, but I'm not all that picky since usually you have decide on the spot and can't just open the machine up first.
With networking gear, I don't bother with anything beyond 100Mbps in wired and 802.11g for wireless. It simply is not worth the hassle.
The only thing I really can think of, is use the hardware to make a wireless bridge if you have two locations to connect that are out of range (can-tenna, etc...) A 11Mbps directional link is better than no link at all. That said, considering the 802.11g prices, you can probably just do it with newer hardware that will use less power. 54Mbps gear is already to be found in dumpsters near you.... I'm not kidding.
The other option would be to re-use it for people you can help in the low-income bracket. An older P-III laptop with a 802.11b card and a 802.11b router/access point is better than no gear at all. Still, my experience says that most people -even those in the lower income bracket- don't want the old gear. The few times I did manage to give away refurbished older hardware was to a single-income mom, working as an analyst in the tech sector, so her income wasn't "low" by any stretch of imagination, for her daughters use. (It was a AMD Athlon XP 2800+, 1GB RAM running Ubuntu 8.10 back then... Haven't gotten any news since). The others were just computer enthousiasts (professional or hobbists) who wanted something to toy around with.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Simple
Just like any other crap, bundle it all up and put it on ebay. The alternative is landfill.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Sell it on craigslist or ebay, or donate it to charity and buy a stick of gum with the tax deduction.
Throw it away and don't feel bad about it. New Jersey isn't even at 10% capacity yet.
If it is not useful to yourself or anyone you know don't just throw it away, find a local electronic recycling depot. In some places that can be hard, but at least if you have a Best Buy near you they will take it.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I agree. Trash them, same as you trashed your {2|3|4}86 boxes and your {MSDOS|WIN31} floppy disks.
An alternative is to donate them to some non-profit organisation which sends them to third-world countries; imagine for example how a Haiti school could benefit from some wifi equipment (provided, of course, the NPO also gets a few computers for them!)
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
http://www.computeraid.org/ refurbishes and ships this stuff to africa and beyond!
When you don't want old computer equipment, you give it away on your local Freecycle. I thought everyone knew that.
NB: does not work with CRT monitors.
Set the WIFI broadcast name of the router to something like, "George Hamilton cheated on his SATs!" where "George Hamilton" = your boss's name. Take it to work, plug it in, and hide it under your desk or someone else's. Can be used for all kinds of passive-aggressive complaining at work.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Flash it with something like DD-WRT that will let you use better encryption and allow for mesh networking, then get together with your local community and help them setup a community based wireless mesh network from your donation and other locals who have extra tech lying around unused.
One great thing about 802.11b was the range. Grab some pringles cans, make some antennas, and start a neighborhood wifi co-op where everyone shares their broadband connections in exchange for access.
In Silicon Valley, you take stuff like that to Weird Stuff Warehouse, which handles both surplus and electronics recycling. They're more into commercial gear, though; if you want previous-generation 1U servers, they have plenty.
Where's a link to an IT Hoarders episode when you need it? (damn work firewall)
WPA with TKIP is compatible with a number of .11b devices. A firmware/driver upgrade is usually what you need to support it.
If that doesn't work, then recycle them.
Don't throw it out. Make a secondary network for music streaming. Compatibility permitting, put OpenWRT onto the router(s). Make a WAP for your car. Portable WAP via a small power supply. Practice cracking WEP keys. Annoy people by leaving it unsecured, but not connected to the Internet. Give it to someone who needs it. Turn off the wireless and create a protected subnet on your network. Make it make you toast. Set it up and yell at it when you get angry. Routers are tough, they can take it.
If you happen to be in Portland, Freegeek does good things with your old stuff.
Actually 802.11b has WPA support albeit only with TKIP ecncryption. It worked for me on linux prism hostap drivers after I updated card's firmware. So maybe you could use it, you don't need much bandwith if you just browse and SSH from your wireless devices. :)
Reduce -- too late, you presumably already have replacements
Reuse -- Freecycle etc, charities,
Recycle -- last option.
WPA was designed as an intermediate standard which would function on WEP-only hardware. That's why WPA uses TKIP instead of AES (which is what WPA2 uses). The devices may require firmware updates (which, of course, may not exist or may no longer be available) but the hardware itself is capable of WPA.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Please don't bin the stuff, it's horribly contaminant to the environment. Recycle it through your local electronics recycler, in Portland we have a non-profit called Free Geek that will even work to give it a second life before it gets tossed. - www.freegeek.org
you can usually turn off the wireless on most wireless routers and just use it as a regular old wired router, if it comes to that. but other than that, im sure you can donate it to the goodwill. I love goodwill. I got me a Samsung HT-XQ100 with digital optical in and a center speaker bar for $13 the other day and it works great for decoding digital audio from my WDTV box.. the only thing that didn't work was the DVD player doesn't load CD's or DVD's.. oh well, already got a DVD player anyways.. also got a famiclone for $1.50, whee... I don't need an 802.11b router, but there must be someone out there who could either use one of might enjoy hacking one to death.
Donate to ACCRC. A recycling shop run by Linux geeks.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
... should not be thrown in the trash. (and broken things should be fixed) I am certain someone who has far less toys than you do can actually put it to better use than you ever did. It's amazing how much we take our own access to communications technology for granted. I am certainly against hoarding and excessive consumerism, I simply think we should make better use of what we already have before we start throwing perfectly good gear in the trash. Many old wireless routers can be made useful again with an alternative firmware like dd-wrt. I am using older routers as repeaters around my house to extend my network's range. Security isn't as tight as it could be, but certainly effective enough for my concerns and circumstances.
I've come across a hammer in my toolbox. Any idea what I could do with it? Is it worth any time putting it to use, or should I just leave it in my toolbox?
(PS: aside from being cynical, this post also answers the OP question - using 802.11b equipment along with a hammer can be a whole-lotta fun ;)
Trash it (well, recycle it anyhow). Nobody wants the junk. Seriously.
The idea that some third world country is grateful to get insecure, unstable, junk computer equipment...well, that's offensive. Rather than shipping your toxic (literally) junk halfway around the world, if you want to support computers in third world countries (hint: more than 802.11b access points, they need things like water and sewage), simply donate MONEY to an organization that is involved in these things. If education and improving the world is your goal, I'd recommend Unicef.
Also, 802.11b uses radio, which means it needs to comply with whatever country's laws you send it to. US channels are not necessarily the third world's channels, and it's best to actually work with the government rather than assuming "They should be grateful weather or not is compatible with their usage of radio spectrum - Look at me, the rich person, doing nothing about their hunger, but giving them my trash I'm too cheap to recycle!"
I've worked for non-profits, the other suggestion here. We had lots of people offer us worthless junk for tax write-off purposes. Apparently our mission was not important enough to have reliable computer equipment (we only fed the hungry, so we apparently, unlike business, didn't need a computer with things like a warranty). Anytime you have "free" equipment, if you don't have a plan in place to replace/repair it when it breaks, it's not worth having - because you will end up depending on the equipment, which will be a disaster when it fails (and you have no money to fix it).
You can always set up the routers in no-security mode and then make the clients use IPSec http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipsec
If you connect to the internet via a software router it is even possible to disallow any connections out-of-the-house without proper authentication.
At some point, the hassle of working with old junk and making it work, putting up with how slow it is, dealing with failing electronics, and so forth isn't worth it.
I have 17 Pentium 3 class systems in my basement in a render farm. Sure, it's neat to have so many systems. But for my purpose, a single $300 quad core box literally has more compute power, more memory, more memory bandwidth, and uses way less electricity. Plus you don't have to maintain a billion systems. And it takes up less space. And there's no heat problem. I haven't replaced the pile yet, because I'm not doing that much 3D lately, but I will, and it will be awesome to be rid of so much clutter. I also have a bunch of Sun boxes. They were fun to get working, but they use too much power, and it's an absolute hassle to fiddle with them, maintain software on several platforms, and so forth. My free time is valuable; I don't want to waste it doing menial maintenence on crappy hardware.
Off brand low end consumer gear is barely designed to last 3 years, let alone past life expectancy. Most of that 802.11b gear is pretty limited in what it can do, and barely worked when it was new. It's not like you can install dd-wrt and turn them into a mesh.
Best case scenario is probably hooking up somebody who has no wireless and no resources up, like your local church or whatever. If it breaks, meh, they had low expectations to begin with. It may not even be worth doing that though, because a lot of older consumer routers break when subjected to the network behavior of newer versions of Windows because they can't handle scaling window sizes with the default settings, and it's a support chore to dink around with the settings on every machine that comes along in a non-enterprise environment.
Bottom line is that old junk starts costing you more to use than buying new stuff would.
I had an old Linksys 802.11b access point whose wireless didn't work. I opened it up, removed the handy WiFi PCMCIA card, and use it as a router. Removing the non-working WiFi card reduced power usage by about one watt.
You could use one of the old wireless routers to provide free & anonymous Internet access to others by routing all the traffic through TOR.
1. Disable any encryption & access restriction like MAC filters
2. Plug it into a separate ethernet port of a server / machine that's running 24/7
3. Route all the traffic through TOR
4. Throttle its traffic (QOS)
When your neighbor's Internet breaks down some day, they will be thankful for the free, albeit slow, Access Point of yours. Thanks to TOR, you don't have to fear any consequences for any mischief that's conducted over your AP.
Here's an example setup: https://www.agol.dk/elgaard/torap/.
Freecycle them or put them on Craigslist in the free section. Someone will come get em.
n/t
It sounds like they could use some upgraded equipment.
I would expect if you really thought it over you could come up with some uses for that hardware that don't require the latest, greatest, sexyest security. For example, you could probably build a lower-power print server using the 802.11b stuff; do you really need the best possible security for a print server?
Another possibility is to ask around and see if you can find someone who lives in a less-densely-populated area that could safely use less secure hardware. You might know someone who lives in the boonies, far from a road, who would appreciate a free network upgrade for whatever internet access they have (or don't have).
Or you could just put the whole lot up on ebay. I'm sure whats-her-name would appreciate the campaign contribution...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The submitter doesn't know what to do with his 802.11b networking equipment, and says it's outdated? What the hell should I do, then, with my closet full of 802.11a adapters?
Seriously -- I got some Intel equipment for $5 a piece, originally $300+, and used it to build my first wireless network. It was a real Frankenstein's Monster of a setup, too: a dialup connection, a Coyote Linux box, and this crazy grey box that was so inefficient, it had a cooling fan built in. The thing didn't even have any sort of basic wired router/switch capability. It sat on top of the fridge for a couple of years... until we went to move it and saw that the warmth had turned it into a magnet for roaches. You've heard of a Roach Motel? This was a high-rise Roach Health Spa. That particular 802.11a adapter went straight into the burn bin (plastic and all).
Sadly, though, I still had three more units. At $5 each, I'd bought four.
To answer my own question, though, of what to do with them... I dropped them off before business hours at a local PC repair shop last week, along with a half-dozen old PCs that the kids were tired of tripping over. I hope they'll be able to put them to good use. After all, who's going to be able to eavesdrop on an 802.11a wireless connection?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Take a picture of the lot of it in one big messy pile. Put it on CL for $20. There's bound to be some geek who's mom raised the rent on his basement "command center" the same day he spilled a can of Jolt on his draft-n router.
If you read any of the UK tech websites, a lot of landfill bound computers get shipped to Africa as "donated" computers, the companies doing the dumping get HUGE tax breaks, and the country where these are dumped get Heavy Metals in their water table.
A quick google search says this is happening in Nigeria and Nairobi
http://makeitfair.org/the-facts/news/news-item-1
Yeah that's right.. No bloody A, B, G, or N. the RAW real original 2MB cards. I actually got them for free as we asked the company that made them for some "samples" so we could do testing on them.. And they sent us 5 with 2 PCMCIA "ISA" cards :) But that was so 1998.
I agree with an earlier comment about putting dd-wrt on it if you can. but also put it on your new router too. Then setup QoS, connect your routers together and let people outside of your network have a sandbox with free internet. just set the QoS super low (like 100kbps down and 10kbps up) so it doesnt affect your day to day use. your neighbors will appreciate it and your router will like not being thrown away
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
I thought B was found to have a 'unfixable' security flaw years ago?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Your local Goodwill will take it, clean it up and either find a good home for it or dispose of it responsibly. They might even come and pick it up if you've got enough stuff, and in the process you'll be helping the folks who Goodwill helps. I'd call it a Win-Win-Win if it didn't annoy the Mac users.
If you do that at my workplace, a couple of very serious men with badges, guns, and a laptop running Red Hat will momentarily be walking around your work area. They'll find it in short order. I'd rather not throw away my career, thank you.
Normally, as not only a member but the founder of GhettoBSD, I would say to keep it and stick it in a future box you might happen to obtain. But being how times have changed, it might not be such a great idea to continue using it as it will hold back the speed of access for whatever ends up using it.
But what would be GhettoBSD Approved! Is that you build a little set up and donate it to a school. Yeah, they probably have things 4x better than what you could provide, but they could give it away to a child in need.
Recently I pruned my collection and was at a loss as to what to do. I really couldn't give away 850 Mhz amd's I used as my servers, because most people just couldn't find them useful. Contacting 'local' recycling centers returned pretty expensive fees to take the components for recycling. Sticking them in the trash was really not an option I wanted to contemplate. So I ended up parting them them out. Hopefully they made someone happy!
Depending where you live and your city, you might be lucky enough to have a local government that promotes recycling. Try that avenue! If not, maybe a local recycling center will take it for free. But the worst thing would be to just toss them in the trash.
BTW, if you have any good junk you don't want, let me know... lol
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
Ask first. There's a place where I live that explains where they ship things. They charge more.
I have a lot of old routers, some even with a USB connection for external storage devices. I would like to find a way to use something like dd-wrt and make my old routers that I'm not using into a file/web/whatever server, using a USB external drive as storage. That would produce a low power alternative to running a computer. Any thoughts on this?
Doorstops.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Free Geek
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It won't cause significant interference if nobody's on it very often, or if you live somewhere that the airwaves aren't overcrowded.
Either run it unencrypted, or use encryption but set the SSID to "Password = guest" and be nice to the people who can't just log in to "linksys" any more.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There's three things you can do: you can donate/sell/discard the
item, you can keep it against future need, you can offer it
to friends/neighbors etc.
The donate/sell path is useful to the next owner (don't knock
WEP, for a lot of folk it's quite sufficient), provided he/she
can figure out the configuration procedure. Scribble the
configuration address on the case, and fasten the AC adapter
securely to the router, if you go this path.
Keeping it, you can turn off the transmitter and DHCP functions
and it's a switch (and if your wilderness cabin needs connectivity,
it can come out of mothballs with a simple push of the RESET
button to be a full router). In case your 802.11N goes down,
configuring it to only talk to your three MAC addresses gives you
a backup router that isn't likely to be hacked into.
I'd keep it, myself. All the 'extra' functions of newer
items are minor frippery compared with the core value, fast-enough
wireless connection.
There are tons of uses; if you can't think of them, then
You can set up a wireless bridge between two distant points. See if you can't get ahold of some old Dish Networks reciever dishes.
And, significantly: freecycle them/give them away. There are a lot of people who use really old stuff and would love free upgrades (you know, manual laborers who are none the less intelligent and enjoy tinkering).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Take the stuff to Best Buy and they'll recycle it in a responsible manner. Landfilling it is unacceptable in this day and age.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Stuff with less specs than that, especially laptops, still go for decent folding green around here. You won't find anything like that in dumpsters, you'd have to go way back to like pentium 1 stuff for that. Shoot, I'm still using a sempron at 1.3 gig, although I did bump the ram to 2 gigs. A typical bundle around here for a hundred bucks would be a pentium 4 something or other with half a gig of ram and a 15 inch crt monitor, usually some off lease old business desktop or mini tower. Used laptops of similar vintage are like 200 and up (which does get stupid with *mart lappies going for 350 a lot of times on sale).
And I am still using an old "no wireless" router, still works fine, never even owned any 802.11 gear. Network cables still work.
One of the advantages of living in an old cabin, out in the medium sticks, no one gives crap one if you need to pop a hole in a wall. (Muahahahaha! Just had an idea for some sport! Next time I need another hole in the wall for a cable, instead of a cordless drill, I am going to use my .45 with some hardball..just cuz I can..heheheh)
.. or do they borrow all your wi-fi bandwidth? Simpler than http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html you can run an old 802.11b system throttled down to 1 Mbit/sec on a crowded channel with a duplicate SSID.
Andrew Yeomans
Do you even need WEP? Anything interesting you do online is SSL based anyway, right? Do some simple WEP and MAC address locking and you keep people from stealing your wireless, and be done with it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Find an organization that needs computer equipment. I've donated a lot of working equipment to a local homeschool coop. Other possibilities are: Charter schools, underprivileged/low-income, churches, non-profit organizations.
But please don't waste their time passing off stuff that doesn't work. If it's junk, then junk it. (Or recycle, whatever your location has available.)
In Portland, there's Freegeeks. They'll take pretty much anything that works.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In college I used my old wifi router for gaming when not in class or skipping to game. I experiment on it, that what I did to my dlink di-524 rev C 54Mbps turned into a di-624 108Mpbs, has a fan soldered on to it, if you totally destroy it try recycling with company X for a rebate on a new router. Perhaps you can look for DD-WRT firmware for your router and make it more practical? Now I connect my router to a battery and hide it in a park, on top of a hill or other place of interest and war drive around looking for it, in the hope I can figure out a solution to connect me and my buddy via wifi living serveral klicks apart. LOL or give / set it up for that neighbor you don't like, then do your torrenting etc. via them.
Hook the router to a lead-acid, put it in repeater mode. This is especially easy if the router wants 12v, as most UPSs (and conventional ICE cars in the U.S., for that matter) use 12v batteries.
This solves the "what to do with old 802.11b equipment?" problem, but introduces the new problem, "what to do with mobile repeaters?" -- I'm sure you can be creative, though =)
Since 802.11b can be faster than many Internet connections (at least in the United States), a dedicated network can be used to bridge two or more networks which can use each other in case of an outage. For instance, my work is physically close to my home. Both places are on cable modems, but since throttling happens at the modem, the speed between the two is limited by the uplink rate of each place. By setting up a wireless bridge, I can communicate between the two at about five times the speed (500k/sec as opposed to about 100k/sec) while leaving the Internet feeds usable for other applications.
Also, if the connection goes down on one network, a simple route command on one of the NAT / routing machines makes everything go through the other network's Internet connection.
In the case of high wireless network density (I can see about twenty wireless networks from my work), you can also use 802.11b hardware on channels that aren't commonly used in the US such as 12 and 13 (Europe) or 14 (Japan).
Perhaps it's not ideal, but slow is better than none.
802.11b is still faster than the majority of Internet Services out there.
So, aside from being limited to WEP, it's slow speed moving things from computer to computer in your home/office won't be a factor for the majority of people who use wireless only for Internet Access.
I know that's basically been said time and time again in the above posts, I just wanted to chime in about it's slower speed not being an issue if it's only used for Internet Access.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
and doesn't care too much about security. Me, I'm still using my original AirPort base station, because it's still faster than my 1.5Mbps DSL connection, and I don't copy files around my local house network too much. Also I trust my neighbors so WEP is enough for me.
Do what I did with my old 802.11b WAP: Unplug the WAN cable, open up the access, mark the network name as "Free Wi-Fi", and leave it plugged in. I was surprised how many people had connected to it after only a few weeks! :-)
Then I gave it away to my father-in-law. His WAP had just died, and he needed another one. I tried to convince him to just buy a new WAP that supported better security and faster speeds, but he didn't want to spend the money. But I did get him to lock it down by client MAC address.
But you mentioned other equipment like cards and adapters. I'd send those to recycling. I just did the same with some 10/100 PCMCIA cards, and some 10/100 ISA boards. I suppose I originally kept them because "someone" might want them "some day". Never happened.
I take all of my old stuff to work and store it in the large green storage box out back of the building. It's nice because the big green box never gets full and there is always room for more. It does smell kind of bad though and there's the occasional rat to contend with.
Seconded. Set up the system, practice hacking WEP, run a honey pot, use it to infect stupid users who connect to anything open......
Old electronics are generally worthless, and nonprofits are ill-equipped to dispose of them properly. Take them to a legit electronics recycler to keep them out of the landfill (best case) or out of some illegal dump in the 3rd world where some poor wretch is smelting plastic to harvest the copper.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If there's an electronics flea market nearby with a not-too-steep fee for sellers, that might be an option. There are people who are interested in having this kind of junk, especially if it's free. That's the best kind of recycling - pass it on to someone who will actually use it.
Bow-ties are cool.
You can create a virtual SSID in an isolated VLAN. Nodes that attach to that SSID would use an SSL VPN to connect to a single dual-homed device providing the SSL VPN connection. No need for WEP/encryption at all if you do that.
If someone is not technical enough to know how to do that, I would not give them WEP-only gear as it is just a setup for trouble.
Use them as paperweights?
Non Profits especially in social services would LOVE you if you donated stuff like that. I know my last job would write a letter of thanks for even a single router (jhsdurham.on.ca - a non profit in Canada)
I gave my 802.11b router to my in-laws. They have two compters and rarely use them at the same time , only using them to check email and surf the web. Their ISP is a greater bottleneck, with a top speed of 6mbps, than the router.
I agonized about tossing my USR Courier. Best modem ever, but I'll never need it again, nor will anyone else.
I'm guessing you're not an owner of a Series 1 TiVo and don't know anyone who is.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
use your old gear only for connectivity, encryption and authorization can be provided by vpn. connect you AP directly to Linux box, set up proper firewall rules to disallow any packets other than necessary for vpn, set up the vpn server and you are good to go with any old equipment.
I would say see if anyone around wants to 'get into' computers, teching, and networks. Older hardware like this is a great way to start learning things like MAC addresses, DHCP, Wifi Encryption (albeit older) and the like.
Some very good suggestions on here, even though I do not agree they should be just pitched in the dumpster. If none of these options suit you, consider finding a local ham radio group or becoming a ham yourself. 802.11b/g falls within one of the frequency bands allocated to ham radio. Operated under that service (ham radio) you can use amplifiers, directional antennas and all sorts of other goodies. From what I read, you can go up to 100W out on a 802.11 b and up to (holy cow) 1500W on 802.11 g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_multimedia_radio
I feel compelled to respond to this, even though it'll never receive the attention of the mods because the story is yesterday's.
I've spent a year working in a rural East African hospital, where I helped them rationalise their IT systems and build a site-wide IP phone network, among other things. One of the biggest problems we faced was well-meaning western donors sending old computers and IT hardware!
- If the only computers you can buy in an East African capital city have SATA connections, why would we want your old IDE drives?
- If the wireless networking gear we're using is all working at 802.11g, why would we want your old 802.11b gear?
- If we can't use the stuff, what do we do with it? Throw it into a hole in the ground, where the heavy metals in the components will leech into the water table? Burn it, polluting the local environment? At least in the US or Europe, it'll be disposed of sensibly.
I know it sounds like a good idea; I know it feels better than putting it in the trash. But often palming off your old gear onto a community in the developing world causes more problems than it solves.