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Ask Slashdot: Wireless LAN Options? 95

Posted by Cliff from the network-by-air dept.
fiji asks: "I am contemplating a wireless LAN for my house and was wondering if anyone had found a cheap, reliable, Linux solution. I have been looking at the Linux WLAN page and the ZoomAir cards but was a little put off because the price is $250 for the ISA and $230 for PCMCIA (at buy.com). Also the support matrix at the WLAN driver page shows the ISA as untested under Linux." Has anyone tested the ISA ZoomAir cards yet? What other driver options exist for Wireless LAN?
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Ask Slashdot: Wireless LAN Options? More

Ask Slashdot: Wireless LAN Options?

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  • I've used several of the cards to set up a wireless masquerading firewall for a bunch of laptops. I've actually found the linux support to be better than the Win9x support for these cards, but they have problems with nfs mounts, and sometimes will break an ssh connection. Also, I've run into problems using the cards with a 2.2 kernel, so I'd recommend using 2.0.37 if you use these cards.
  • Gaah. Wait till the first lightning storm comes.
  • Posted by 2B||!2B:

    I've been looking at getting a similar 802.11 unit.

    At: http://www.ndclan.com/Wireless/wireless.htm
    they sell 2 Mbps units which cost less (around $200, I believe). But no Linux drivers on the site (yet).

    http://www.sohoware.com/Products/CableFREE.htm is another.

    My favorite of all (which I will probably buy; only around $150 per unit, 2Mbps) is: http://www.webgear.com/
    It's cheapest of all, but has the problem that they have 3 different product lines, 2 of which are 2.4 GHz (but it isn't really clear whether the 2 are compatible with each other). Besides using it to hook up my laptop, I may set up a network with some neighbors so we can share my wireless Internet feed (which is > 1.5 Mbps; very cool, since I can't get DSL where I live). Like the rest, no Linux drivers on the site.
  • Posted by twojciaczyk:

    Even with the use of a balun to match impedence, you still have the issue of 10base2 termination and distance limitation. On 10base2 you have the 100 meter limitation, with 100base5 you have a 500 meter limitation; All of this and not to mention that your cable must be terminated at all endpoints and must be a bus configuration, and not a star configuration like most cable companies run. ...along with the fact that the cable is already live and has modulated signals that will interfere with Ethernet.... it'll never work

  • Can we say ground loop anyone? Don't run cat-5 from building to building, it was never intended to do that, and so while it might work you are asking for trouble, such as destroying your computers.

    The orginial 10base5 ethernet was designed to run builing to building (if the trnascivers will do that I don't know. For that matter, I don't know where you would find it as nobody has done 10base5 since the mid 80s at least, other then to fix the old already installed systems.

    Best bet: fiber. Glass is immune to a lot of electircal probelms, and the cables are cheaper. You have to look, but you can pick up some cheap 10baseFL cards for nothing, and linux supports the ones I've got.

    Please folks, if you don't know how to prevent ground problems don't run wire from building to building. Glass fiber is cheap enough, and it avoids a mess of problems and won't destroy your computers.

  • WRONG! (Score:1)

    by Viper ( 1186 )
    Probably too late for anybody to read this but I will mention it for posterity's sake :)

    Not sure about 10BaseT (origional question) but the coax I am sure about:

    10Base2 = 200m ~ 600ft max length (between terminators)
    = 1m between nodes
    = 30 max # of nodes

    10Base5 = 500m ~ 1500ft
  • From the research I've done, you only need a Windows configurator if you use one of the Symphony special devices, like their cordless modem or wireless-wired bridge.

    I've found that I can get the Symphony ISA card in a computer with a wired ethercard for only a little more than what you'd pay for the bridge, and get a lot more functionality (SSH tunneling to get around the fact that Symphony transmits in the clear, for one thing, interests me).

    The Symphony is cheap, and as such is limited in range (they advertise 150 feet indoors, 300 feet outdoors) and speed (A good speed over a solid link seems to be about 60 kilobytes/sec). The driver is also not fully open-source; there's a binary-only library file that it links against. Fortunately, sufficient source is available that upgrading your kernel doesn't break the driver.

    Someone please tell me if I'm way off the mark here.

  • The ZoomAir ISA does work with the linux-wlan package because the ZoomAir ISA is a PMCIA card with an ISA adapter included.

    I'm not an expert on the other cards....but if they're not 802.11 compliant, avoid them. Each of the non-802.11 implementations is vendor specific. I can't tell you how many times people have talked to me about being stuck with orphaned wireless products. With 802.11 compliant products, your investment is safe.

    -Mark

    PS: If the guy from Great Britain notices this...check Nokia. Their cards will work with linux-wlan and were developed in Great Britain.
  • CBC = Capitol Brodcasting Company, used to own Interpath [interpath.com]
  • Not to mention the geek factor of having ethernet jacks in the walls.
  • Actually, a Beowulf cluster using wireless would be pretty interesting. You could have nodes that automatically joined the group computation when they come into range, and disconnect when they leave range.

    There, I actually did a follow-up to a Beowulf troll.
  • Give these folks a dose of the Slashdot Effect ...

    radiolan [radiolan.com]

    AiroNet [aironet.com]

    ShareWAVE [sharewave.com]

    Me, I still use POC (plain old copper)

  • > chances are if someone else didnt think of it first then the idea is silly to begin with

    Not that I disagree with your analysis of the previous post as a DRASTIC over-simplification, but that aside, your quote above is almost as laughable... you must not be very creative, every time you come up with an idea a Pavlovian response inside must tell your that it's just silly.

    Binary Boy

    -- Not afraid to have new, and occassionally silly, ideas.
  • I also tried the Aironet card at USENIX. It worked very well and I was considering buying some for home use, but they are just a bit too pricey. The access points are $1,200 and the cards are $400. (And this was with the conference discount.) If these prices would come down by 50%, I would probably consider them more seriously.

    The literature that I got from DSI (Dynamic Solution International) show that they have ISA and PCI cards for desktop machines in addition to PCMCIA cards for laptops. One access point will cover 60,000 sq. ft at 11Mbps, so this does seem like a good solution in environments where running cable is impractical. (It'd be an even better solution if the price would come down.)
  • I had the fortune to use a ricochet modem with my linux box about a year and a half ago. Setup was ridiculously easy. I just plugged it into my serial port and treated it like a modem. Speed was only fair (about 19K), but I was in the middle of a big concrete apartment building, so I figured the reception was to blame. Unfortunately, I had to give the demo unit back when the school I worked for refused to allow the ricochet folks to use our rooftop for an antenna.
  • I had a thought the other day and would appreciate comments from those who understand this stuff better than I do.
    It occurred to me that your average BNC jack equipped NIC card only knows whether or not there's a load of the proper impedence and trermination attached for it to work into or whether or not there's a recongnizable (right voltage, right duty cycle, right waveform)signal present across its input. So instead of coupling cards together with RG-58 or whatever, what about just sticking antennas (antennae?) on them instead? I realize that your average UHF, 2 meter, whatever, "rubber duckie" would probably be all wrong impedence-wise at baseband frequencies, but with the right antenna design could this work over short distances?

    I am also accepting opinions (informed, humourous, and otherwise)as to the meaning of BNC.

  • I've seen plans for a satellite TV dish made out of concentric plywood rectangles, but the idea of an antenna made out of a rooftop sound even more intriguing.



  • How about coupling the RG-58 to the RG-59 (or RG-6) and back again with transformers? Impedence matching and DC isolation in one. Of course, if the cable company is doing their own base band signalling over those lines your system and their's will probably keep crashing each other, and I'm sure there's some fine print somewhere in your lease or cable contract that says they get to sic their lawyers on you if you use their cable for anything.
  • At first I thought you meant Central Carolina Bank, but that's CCB. What does CBC stand for ? (Haven't been through the Cap city in a while)

  • Hm, well, I wouldn't expect a phone to have an ethernet jack, but IBM does make a 900Mhz cordless phone with a standard phone jack built in, which means that you can do wireless modeming...

    Well, at least they used to. The web page is blank now. :/
  • As one who has braved under the house to run catagory 5, I can say that there is MUCH more geekyness in running the wire, putting together the little panel-boxes, etc than buying premade preboxed kit. And live video from across the house gets more oohs and aahhs than an ftp session.
  • The other problem, unless they've come out with something pretty new lately, is that the connection over a powerline ends at the transformer outside of the house, so setting up a house-to-house network is not an option (which would, I believe, be the real killer app for this in suburbia, where millions of kiddies are planning the destruction of their school WAIT! I meant playing Quake/Doom over the phone wasting perfectly good ports on the ISPs modem bank.
  • What's the limit on CAT5 cable anyway?
    Would that require a repeater of some sort?
    ------------------------------------------
    Reveal your Source, Unleash the Power. (tm)
  • If you can find them, the older ISA WaveLAN cards (~2Mbit/sec) are pretty cool, and had decent support under RedHat 4.2 (to give you an idea of how long support has been around in a commercial distro). I had problems with one under Windows95 (transmit lockup) but no problems on a P120/32 RHL4.2 system.

    I don't have all the spec's handy, but they're full-length ISA cards with a type-F connector on the back, and an external square pancake antenna (white). NCR was the manufacturer at the time. They are -not- compatible with the currently shipping WaveLAN systems (different encoding schemes and operating frequencies), so older cards are much cheaper. :-)

    -Phyxis
  • I actually use a Ricochet "SE" series TA every single day at work. I have another "classic, Phase 2" Ricochet unit at home for personal use.

    My overall review of the equipment:
    Very very cool stuff. ~100kbit/sec burst packet radio, behaves just like a standard Hayes command set serial modem.

    My overall review of the service/coverage:
    On my linux box (P133 laptop/RHL 5.0) I get best results with MTU/MRU manually set at 576. I found that interactive performance is _MUCH_ better than with the stock 1500. Don't expect this to be like a land-line... it's packet-based, so even though you can sustain 28.8kbit/sec throughput, it's burstier... and latencies are a bit longer.

    Metricom/Ricochet market this device as a "wireless email/web-browsing link"... which is exactly what it's best at. Think carefully before you invest, they're not cheap, but they /can/ fit certain specific needs extremely well.

    I haven't had a chance to play with unit-to-unit or STRIP modes, but I use standard (virtual PPP Terminal Adaptor -- lets you have a PPP link into Ricochet's network) and TMA (virtual land-line dialout modem -- lets you dial a local land-line modem wirelessly) extensively... although I'm not quite happy with their newer 100hrs/mo, 4hrs consecutive policy on TMA, I do understand the need for cost-control.

    Just my $0.02 in the bit bucket...

    -Phyxis

    PS: There's rumors of a 128kbit sustained "Generation 2" Ricochet network being built. *hope*hope*hope* :-)

  • In addition to the phone-line networking products previously mentioned, Intelogis [intelogis.com] makes a power-line networking product, PassPort [pcconnection.com], which is promising because they've open-sourced [intelogis.com] their code and are working on Linux drivers. And, they're cheap! $109 for two PCs and a printer isn't shabby. Of course we're only talking about 350Kbps, but when you're sharing 56K or ISDN (128K) who cares. Plus, I don't know why, it appeals to me to be able to have only one thing to plug in. The brick IS the jack. cooool.
  • Currently, the power line solutions are relatively slow (about 350Kbps). But they are cheap, $109 for 2 computers _and_ 1 stand-alone printer (after current $50 rebate). So if you can stand slower networking when your significant other turns on the hair dryer, they might work for you.

    This Intelogis news release [intelogis.com] indicates that power-line networking may be getting faster (10Mbps) and more reliable. I wonder how they're doing that, spread spectrum perhaps? Also noteworthy: Intelogis software is open source [intelogis.com].

  • Hmmmmmm. seems like you could go way cheap if you didn't mind doing some soldering and whatnot. Modulate the outs/ins on cat5 so that you could hook up both modualted signals (10baseT, 4 for 100) to cheap walkie talkies. Splice the the wires in the cable and hook them up to a squelch, so that the "talk" button is pushed when a packet goes out (you'll probably lose the first packet, but tcp/ip should send it again) and releaed when not sending. One tranciever recieves, one sends, have this setup on each device.

    I am by no means an electrical/radio engineer, but it seems to me that this would be a cool hack if somebody pulled it off.

    dan
  • Two other options that come to mind would allow you to use a regular NIC. There are numerous wireless products that will let you plug a NIC into a wireless transciever or hub. However this is probably about as expensive as what you've been looking at already. At the moment, it seems that cheap and wireless are mutually exclusive, at least in the LAN arena. However, another thing to look at is using your home wiring. There are products out there that will allow you to connect 10Base equpment via your existing electrical wiring. This will likely be cheaper than wireless equipment.
  • I had a chance to use the Aironet 11Mb card at the USENIX Technical Conference a couple of weeks ago, and the Linux driver worked very well. But those guys had several access points for a hundred or so cards--they were loaning them out to conference attendees. Definitely not the typical home-network setting!

    My question is, if I were starting a new installation for a home network, which cards are easiest to set up? I notice that with the Proxim Symphony, you must have a Windoze machine available to configure the thing, as it must already be configured when you try to use the Linux driver and the configurator's only available in a Win32 GUI.

    Also, do any of these have a NAT built-in? Most high-speed access solutions such as ADSL and cable modem only give you a single IP address, and charge steep rates for additional ones. So, you want a NAT (Network Address Translator) to make all your machines look like a single machine to your service provider.

    If you wanted to NAT but the wireless access-point didn't do it, it seems to me you'd have to have two ethernet cards on a PC that would have the wireless access point on one card and your high speed connection on the other, running NAT software (ipchains would work, but there are other options) to translate between the two. That seems like a lot of work to me, and too many things to go wrong! :-)
  • I know people who have hooked wavelan cards up to directional antennas to get a few miles, line of sight.
  • Check out http://www.rage.net/wireless/wireless_howto.html

    It sounds like you can set up a 384kbps link up to 25 mi away or 2Mbps up to 4 miles away with their setup. They spent $1300.
  • I don't know if it's offered elsewhere, but in Austin you can get an ISP that provides 3Mb/s both ways. It's about $3 more than basic cable modem in the area, however, you must live within 10 miles of their site (near downtown/campus). Look at http://www.nobell.com [nobell.com]
  • I've actually done this, and it works nicely with around 75M of cat5 strung above a parking lot between two buildings.

    However, within the first week the hub at the far end died. Could've been lightning, or just a fluke (wasn't a very good hub to begin with, but the ethernet card on this end survived that round). Replaced the hub with a 3com and installed an APC surge arrest at either end.

    Since that time (more than a year ago), the thing had been working flawlessly until a very recent lightning strike happened nearby and the resultant EMP destroyed lots of equipment in both buildings.

    All modems died along with all other phone-related items such as a PBX and alarm system, the far-away Ascend bit the dust, UPSs suddenly stopped working, video cards smoked, soundcards blackened, motherboards fried; you get the idea.

    What's interesting is that the linux box we have parked over there (connected to the same hub as the Ascend and the lengthy above-ground wire, via a $20 NE2000 clone) survived unscathed. That hub, AFAIK, also lived through it - without losing a port. And though the box on the near end of the network did suffer damage, all indications are that it happened through the modem - the 3c509 which drives the long line is still in service as I write this.

    While lightning hits across the cat5 are certainly a real concern, the above experience shows me that Bad Things are more likely to happen through the phone and electrical systems, and/or an EMP inducted by long cables (RS-232, parallel and similarly single-ended things -- properly installed cat5 wire is highly non-inductive by nature, at least in the *baseT sense).

    Ground loops should be a problem with neither 10/100base-T (cat5) or 10base2 (rg-58 coax). The former has no ground lines at all. The latter is supposed to be grounded only at one end. (side note: if coax is *not* grounded at one end, you are not reaping any of the benefits of the expensive shielded wire.)

    So, if you're close enough to legally string ethernet between the two points in questions, it'd probably work fine, and inexpensively. Fiber would certainly be a better choice, but even if the cable is as inexpensive as the above poster claims, terminating the line is a bitch, the hardware is difficult to find / expensive, and it's nowhere near as flexible as cat5. (I know I'm wrong here, but I'd like to see an ethernet hub with stock fiber ports for less than $2k).

    Having said all this, I should probably also say that although everything here is entirely factual, I don't recommend using any product in a manner inconsistant with the instructions of its maker. However, if you do make the choice to go down this dark path, please use a condom^H^H^H^H^H^H^H surge protector. And be sure to arrange for a trip sitt^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H 'qualified technician' to prevent you from doing anything stupid.
  • Whatya mean seemed cool? ;-)

    Our 11mbit card (PC4800) does'nt require a dos/windows box to configure - just slap it into a Linux box, grab a copy of the driver and it's up and running.

    Unfortunately tho - at this moment we dont have any means for flashing new firmware into the cards via Linux - only dos or windows. I have personally been testing our 11mbit cards with Linux and have gotten 790+Kbytes/sec throughput, much faster than I have gotten on Windows boxes here.
    The author of the driver I'm using - has recently added support for our PCI/ISA adapter cards also - should be info on his website [ucsc.edu]. Aironet didn't write this driver - it was written entirely by Ben from IBM, with help from our tech support dept.

    I must agree on the opinions voiced on the prices - even I can't afford to buy our products :-( Hopefully they will follow the trend set by ethernet cards - those were expensive too 15 years ago...

    NOTE I dont speak for Aironet in any form, shape or fashion, any opinions expressed here are mine alone....

  • I also was contemplating a wireless LAN for my house a month ago. I decided against it because:

    (1) Wireless LANs are expensive as hell

    (2) Speed over wireless LANs sucks

    (3) There are few standards and it's not a well-understood technology. There is high probability that you'll spend all that money and end up being locked into some proprietary suboptimal solution with limited upgradeability.

    So I sighed, and spend a weekend draping cat5 cable all over my house (primarily outside over external walls). It isn't aesthetic, but for $80=Linksys hub + 3x$25=NIC cards + ~$40=patch cables I have a 100Mbs Ethernet that works very well. If anything goes wrong with it, there are zillions sources of information on how to deal with it. And there is a cable modem, hanging off it, as well {grin}.

    So, my point is, think carefully whether you *really* need a wireless network.

    Kaa
  • Hi

    Does anyone know what set-ups which work with Linux are OK for using in the UK (frequency wise) and where some web sites might be for buying kit in the UK?

    Ta
  • Since the apartments are cable ready, you might be able to get away with just putting a 10base2 NIC in the computer with the cable modem attached and hooking the NIC up to the 'regular' cable coax outlet. Ethernet is all broadcast anyway. If you are close enough (1000 feet?) it will probably work. The neighbors might complain about snow on some of the channels though ;)

  • ZoomAIR ISA works (Score:3)

    by mayoff ( 29924 ) on Friday June 25, 1999 @05:22AM (#1833677) Homepage
    I'm using the ZoomAIR-4000 (PCMCIA) on my Thinkpad 770Z and the ZoomAIR-4005 (ISA) on my server to send this reply, so it definitely works.

    The ISA version is an ISA/PCMCIA adapter card with one PCMCIA slot, plus the PCMCIA card. So you have to install PCMCIA card services on your server. You need pcmcia-cs version 3.0.9 (or later I suppose) to use wlan driver 0.2.6.

    As for price - the ZoomAIR is by far the cheapest IEEE 802.11 solution I've seen. It uses the Harris PRISM chipset, and several other vendors also use that chipset, so there should be good interoperability. I know there are cheaper wireless network cards out there, but they're not 802.11 and I think they only do 1 Mbps. And I don't know if there are Linux drivers.

    One more note - I believe Harris is supposed to start shipping the PRISM II chipset in quantity this month, which is supposed to support longer range, lower power, and 11 Mbps (instead of 2 Mbps). So you might want to wait a month or two and see if Zoom releases a new version. I'm okay with 2 Mbps because it's still 16x faster than my ISDN line.

    Drivers are at www.absoval.com .
  • 90m; Thinnet is a better solution if you don't need 100MB/sec.
  • How close together are you buildings? Are they literally 150 feet away or is the building only 20 or so but you two live on opposite ends of your buildings? A Apple Systems Engineer helped wire our building a few years ago. He had a nifty algorithm that he used to calculate whether or not he would have to use fiber or could just use cat5. It also involved nearby trees or other tall structures, ground composition, roofing material, etc... We ended up running fiber fromthe main school 50 feet out to the middle of 3 portable building (glorified trailer houses). From there we ran cat5 out to the two other portables on either side. Its worked flawlessly. He passes away shortly after that so I can't ask him what the algorithm was though. You might consider putting an inline cat5 surge supressor on those outgoing cat5 lines. We have lost 2 nics, 1 inside and one out. I believe it was a building and not a netowrking one, but you can never be too sure. Good luck!

    Justin
  • I have a friend that lives in an apt building close to me. We thought about wireless but that was a little steep. I'm satisfied with just running a cat5 cable over there. Its close enough and the buildings are tall enough that the risk would be nominal. A few inline surge supressors and all would be great. But he's now moving so...bastard... We'll just have to both get ADSL. ;-)

    Justin
  • Ummm... isn't cat5 an ungrounded differential signal? (Yes, it is... that was a rhetorical question, if you didn't catch that.) How could I get a ground loop on it when I'm not using ground as a signal path? 10base2 on the other hand _would_ be a problem.

    -srw
  • I was told it stands for "British Naval Connector"

  • A bunch of friends and I were looking into this idea. The problem comes in with a few things. First, you need chips to modulate your laser from your ethernet pulsing, and also to decode and amplify from the laser recieve photosensor. As far as line-of-sight, it isn't bad, but *nothing* can be in the way. If you use a class 3 laser (laser pointers are part of this) you are generally safe, as long as people never are able to look at the beam. If you go any higher than class 3, you have safety concerns...

    Also, you need a fairly good laser diode to transmit with, just because you can't permit the beam to diffuse very much, or you'll get signal loss. This can be compensated for with different types of beam modulations, but still can be a bit daunting.

    The chips we were looking at were the same they used in OC-48 fiber terminations, but unfortunately I dont' remember the company.
  • The other possible reason is that you can't afford to get sued by the five homeowners between you and your access point. Also, the network admin at that access point had some sort of aversion to a static discharge (read lightning or some like punk messing with the cable) ruining his many thousands of dollars of network equipment in his network closet. What's the tradeoff here, potential for $24,000 in damage because we're lazy and run cable, or play it safe and use wireless...

    Plus, you might want to ask those neighbors about your cable, or it'll be interesting the next time they get a nice we lawn and your cable shows through
  • One of the things that's kept my roommates and I from adopting wireless, is that most wireless options (Diamond's, Intel's, etc) run 1 Mbps. We at least want 10 Mbps, and we'll probably wire it and buy 10/100 cards so that we can switch out the hub in the future and run 100Mbps. Please let me know if anyone has found a reasonably-priced wireless solution that will do over 1Mbps.


    +--
    Given infinite time, 100 monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare.

  • Better Wireless Hardware (Score:4)

    by cshotton ( 46965 ) on Friday June 25, 1999 @05:37AM (#1833686) Homepage
    It's odd, but there still seems to be a serious lack of good wireless ethernet hardware at affordable prices. I don't understand why there aren't more solutions to this problem given all the initiatives to free up frequencies for just this purpose and the availability of low-cost radios on a chip, etc. I gave up on shopping based on price and opted for the most functional solution.

    After a lot of analysis, the BreezeNet series of devices bubbled to the top of the heap. They are NOT cheap, but they will plug into any ethernet NIC and provide totally transparent 1.5 mbit to 2.5 mbit connectivity between a wired LAN and wireless nodes, or between wireless stations only. Details are at http://www.breezecom.com/Products/brz nprd.htm [breezecom.com].

    Unfortunately, a 2 node set-up (for example) will cost well over $1000. The access points (wireless hubs if you will) are around $1000, but you only need one of them. The "stand-alone" stations for individual ethernet interfaces are about $400, if I recall correctly.

    The stuff has fantastic range (well over 500 feet through walls between 2 buildings with little signal loss in my case), requires absolutely no configuration, and works with any 10baseT ethernet device. My only complaint is the expense. If someone made similar hardware at a $200/node price point, they'd own this market.

    FWIW, I have no connection with BreezeCom other than as a satisfied user of the BreezeNet hardware.

  • I have a Lan at home with 5 SG servers (2 on 100baseT, 3 on 10base2) and a Telxon/Aironet 2Mb/sec radio Access Point so my laptop (with PCMCIA Aironet card can log on to the network. In my Technical Consultant role at work I also use Symbol wireless kit, which is good but as yet they have no plans to port to Linux -

    Telxon are working on the Linux port now!!!

    You can limit their kit down to 802.11 if you want, but it currently runs at 11Mb/sec although due to the protocols used 2Mb/s on the rf side gives you greater throughput than 10Mb ethernet, and in the UK, where total output power is restricted to 100mW I have set up reliable distance tests over 1/2 mile outdoors (running Quake 2 happily), although indoors it is reduced a lot. My whole house and garden is served by 1 AP (and I can connect from a neighbour 5 houses away!!)

    Price is coming way down - admittedly not down far enough in the UK, and we still have very restrictive rf guidelines over here...still never mind.
  • Philip Greenspun wrote an excellent review at photo.net/wtr/radiolan.html

    And if you haven't already, have a look at the rest of Philip's site. He's a professor at MIT and most all of what he teaches there can also be found on his site.
  • Does anybody know about any IR-based LAN solution?
    I am looking to connect 4 or 5 stations to a single IR 'hub'. Radio-based is out of the question in this application.

    The only info I have is about this product in Israel.
    http://www.irlan.co.il/products.html

  • iam currently looking for cheap wirlesss lan will
    pay up to 300 bucks but i need it to go 5 miles
    and the cheapest thing that i found which could hack it cost a grand www.wavelan.com/oemkits.html
    cards are cheap i.e 259 bucks but the amps cost 500 bucks got dam it if any one has any info on this mail me @ pyroskie@hotmail.com
  • They are:
    IEEE 802.11 compliant
    Work better over longer distances than the Zoom Air
    Have a great Linux Driver
    From Onsale.com, it is very inexpensive..
    http://www.onsale.com/category/inv/00000214/0183 6248.htm

  • http://www.onsale.com/category/inv/00000214/018362 48.htm

    It works much better than the ZoomAir. It is also cheaper.
  • FWIW, MaximumPC (magazine) did a review and
    liked Webgear's Aviator Pro the best of the
    cards it tested, which were the Aviator Pro,
    Proxim's Symphony, and Diamond's Homefree Wireless.

    The Aviator Pro did about 2MB/s for 500 feet.
    It is a PC-card that comes with a free ISA
    PC-card interface.
  • www.radiolan.com [radiolan.com]

    They have real 10Mbit/s wireless. No drivers for linux, but if someone seriously wants to write them, let me know, and I'll see if I can hook you up with their developers. (Is Mr. Becker listening?)

    -Pete-
    petert@ncal.verio.com
  • I talked to an almost clued sales rep from Ricochet when those things first debuted back in 1997 (in San Jose, CA area). I asked them about interoperativity of those devices with various UNIXen, and apparently, those things are just "ppp nodes" to the computer. So basically, those buggers just look like a modem. Therefore, in theory, they should work with anything that you can find/build a connector for.

    Granted, this isn't something that's from my experience, so YMMV.
  • The problem with that is that the 900MHz phones are built with very little available internal bandwith. Also, most of these things tend to be much noisier than POTS cables (for obvious reasons). That makes it really iffy on the already close-to-limit-of-specs 56k modem transfers.

    They might also do some weird AD-DA conversions with lossy compression, but I'm not sure.
  • There is a wireless coop in its infancy out here in Northern Colorado. Apparently, with a decent gain antenna, you can stretch those devices into a metropolitan area network.
    They are using the 11Mb/s AeroNet [aeronet.com] devices, but I fear they may be stretching things a little too much.
    On another note, two local ISPs here are sharing a NNTP server through a 1Mb/s link. It is running line-of-site between their two buildings, and works great -- it was much cheaper than buying a T1 line from US West [uswest.com], too.

    But what do I know... I'm still impressed that I can bounce 1200 baud packets over the Rocky Mountains...

    --N0ZAP
  • Under *nominal* conditions:
    CAT5 Ethernet = 100m
    Thicknet (10base5) = 175m (I think)
    Coax (10base2) = 150m

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