Ask Slashdot: Wireless LAN Options?

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?

ZoomAIR ISA works

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 .

Better Wireless Hardware

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.