“Wi-Fi’s rise through the corporate structure has been meteoric. The technology has quickly progressed from an alternative wireless method to the de facto means to transfer data wirelessly within a LAN. However, before the mass adoption of Wi-Fi in the enterprise occurs, the advantages and disadvantages of 802.11a and the emerging 802.11g must be understood.” Read the article at InfoWorld.
802.11: Understanding the Alphabet Soup
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Why is it that the author believes that meteors rise? Or is the author really saying that Wi-Fi has fallen from the sky?
There were a number of factual errors as well as just plain stupid opinions:
802.11b not good for the enterprise? Who the hell does office work at faster than 5.5 Mb? It’s not good for file sharing and things of that sort, but let’s be realistic here). Also, in my experience (I work at a Wireless ISP – I live and breathe this stuff – 802.11a isn’t really worth a damn beyond single room deployments. Throughput is cut in half if you have a wall (or in some cases, a cubicle partition) between you and your AP.
802.11a offers 12 non-interfering channels? Wrong. There’s only 8. The first four are for indoor use only, the last 4 are for both indoor and outdoor use.
And it works, now.
I just can’t get into something running at 2.4 ghz one cordless phone and your screwed. 5ghz doesn’t seam safe either they will have phone there in time just for the heck of it. also curious has anyone ever run a 802.11b setup next to a 2.4ghz computer. Been curious if anything happens
I use 802.11b for networking and I also have a 2.4 GHz mobile phone (Siemens Gigaset) and they work fine together. I suppose I could change both of their channels around until they conflicted, but that would take effort. Out of the box, they don’t interfere.
I think luck came in to play for you some. Where i see the most problems is in close living like apartments. You may have control over your phone but not the phones of a dozen neighbors. Also as a good number of people have a wireless setup in the area that will be a problem. 11g only can do 3 differant networks in the same area. I don’t know how many others can do. But unless it’s a few hundred I think there will be serious problems in urban areas.
We are building a mesh network in Chisinau over 802.11a. Some technical details are on the website ( http://www.onlinewhisper.com ) but the rest is kind of not publicly released yet. We will serve Internet over it and it will provide a Metropolitan Area Network at high speed. We are not using it to provide wireless mobile connectivity at the moment but just to avoid laying cable or relying on the local telecom operator.
Last time I was at osnews was when Eugenia said she was leaving… now I see all the latest items posted by her – what’s up?
I guess OSNews is adictive, and it looks like she’s hooked =)
I knew i recognized that name.. Moldova.. cool, have a friend there. Hope you guys are successful.
DaaT
http://www.beosjournal.org
Thanks. The website is crappy but we’re working on it. We plan to have a few users (about 40) to start and we will see from there. April will be the big opening.
We appreciate the support. If you happen to be in Moldova, you’ll have a place to stay… and to connect from.
It seems like you had some horrible experience with 802.11b at some point and haven’t been able to get over it.To start with I have a 2.4Ghz P4 system, and I connect it to my DSL via a usb 802.11b adapter so no there isn’t any issue there.
Secondly I live in a large converted factory, so I am surrounded by other apartments with 2.4Ghz phones, and APs. Most 2.4Ghz phones will channel hop if they get too much noise in their channel. This isn’t out of respect for the other users of the channel, it’s to maintain a level of service in their channel for your phone call. So for the most part phones are a non-issue.
Concerning other APs, they don’t have to be on a non-interfering channel. In my apartment I can turn on a 802.11b sniffer and see 4 other APs, 2 of which are on channels which interfere with the channel I use. This means is that I can not see their AP at the same time I can see my AP, and that if they are using their network at the same time I am we are both going to drop down from 11Mbps. This is what another poster was talking about indoor vs outdoor channels.
What I’m trying to get at is that I use 802.11b as my primary method of connecting to the Internet, under all the “adverse” conditions you mentioned, and I don’t have much difficulty with it at all.
Thanks for the hospitality
Once again, best of luck.
Take care,
DaaT
http://www.beosjournal.org