Trepia -- your instant Wi-Fi community:
meet other people in your vicinity!
Special offer for Wi-Fi News readers: 10% discount on Spire laptop bags and backpacks. Gear up for all your mobile adventures!
The above is a paid, sponsored link. Email for more information.
Subscribe to essays from this site via email. Email to subscribe, or sign up via your Yahoo account.
802.11g worthwhile, but maybe not just yet: A very sensible article by a UK-based ZDNet writer who points out that the future of 802.11g has a lot to do with moving multimedia around the house, not just data around an office. As more and more reports indicate, 802.11a may take traction in education and offices, where more bandwidth is useful, leaving 802.11g dominating home and hot spots.
Because of this split, we're sure to see almost universal deployment of dual-band PC Cards, with every other kind of device choosing: you don't need a dual-band PCI card, as desktop machines rarely move. You don't need a dual-band gateway or access point if you're deploying a single flavor.
The writer of this piece makes two arguable statements: first, the 802.11g devices on mixed b/g networks will drop down just ot 11 Mbps speeds -- this appears to be possible, but not entirely true. Depending on the amount of data involved, g devices should still get better throughput unless b devices saturate the network. Second, he mentions "tri-mode" a, b, and g devices. Unnecessary: 802.11g incorporates full 802.11b backwards support, so it's a/b or a/g, but not a/b/g (in that sense).
IBM includes dual a/b support in new ThinkPads: IBM understands the corporate market, and has thus included public (b) and early enterprise (a) support to hedge their bets. C'mon, it only costs a few bucks more for a dual chipset, and might as well not stagnate the model if the market swings to 802.11a.
The writer of this piece makes the same error (that Wi-Fi is just 802.11b) that many journalists have because of the Wi-Fi Alliance's shift in what Wi-Fi means: Wi-Fi is both 802.11a and b as of a few months ago. This is confusing. I constantly have to write around the problem to avoid misstating the case, even as people who know what Wi-Fi means still think of it generally incorrectly, too. See, the problem with a good brand.