devaldez's Journal: Wireless Musings

Just been thinking about the whole 802.11g flare-ups recently...it's funny how marketing can backfire pretty damn quickly...the major premise of 802.11g over 802.11a was that g could happily live in harmony with 802.11b installations...it can, it just simply throttles back to b bandwidth. So, the only advantage is if you can manufacture g radios less expensively than a/b radios (if you want legacy coexistence/compatibility). Well, it seems pretty obvious that an a/b device would have two radios and therefore cost twice as much...right? Except that to work with b, g also needs a second radio or you throttle back...

In other words, the 802.11g advocates are getting eaten by their own false marketing, whereby they claim that they can have coexistence inexpensively, but they actually cannot deliver coexistence at all (which the a/b crowd can...different freqs and all) and the cost differential between one and two radios is trivial...

Funny how marketing works...