Wireless networking [was Re: [NCLUG] Re: Sean's Social Hacking]

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 08:34:42PM -0700, John L. Bass wrote:
>The point was that at about the same cost, FHSS radios are a LOT slower.
>Thanks for the hard current data to make that point.

Where are you getting that pricing information?  The WebGear cards are
closer to half the price of 802.11b cards.  When a bunch of us bought
our cards, about 18 months ago, it was $150 for two PCMCIA cards and
two PCMCIA<->ISA cards.  So, assuming you only need one ISA/PCMCIA
card, 802.11 is still something around $270 current prices.  At the
time we got the WebGear cards, other wireless cards were over
$200 *EACH* for just the PCMCIA.

People with existing WebGear cards, or people using it between two machines
to access their DSL lines, are still quite able to make use of the WebGear
cards.

>show running a quick test last year. As I noted earlier, with wireless
>802.11b radios generally deliver better than 480KB/sec, or better than
>355% faster than the 135KB/sec figure - nearly 4X faster.

And if most of the time you're using them to talk to a remote server via
your 512kbps DSL line, who cares if it's 1kbps or 4kbps on the wireless
side?

>The decrease from 135KB/sec to 50 KB/sec is not unexpected, the 5-10 seconds
>interactive pkt delays is quite a bit worse than expected.

I'm not saying that 50KB/sec was the max rate that I could pull, I'm saying
that even if I'm only using 50KB/sec or 30KB/sec (say I'm downloading from a
slow remote host or the like) the delays for other traffic on the line
become pretty bad.  I'm wondering if this is a packet ordering issue in
the driver or something...

>Smells like something is very wrong with the WebGear driver/card, maybe lost
>interrupts? Hardware Buffer overrun? Or a context switching glitch/spinloop/lockfailure.
>The 802.11 protocol at 1-2mbps can do much better than that.

Hmm?  The WebGear cards are running 802.11...  You mean DSSS?

Knock it all you want, the WebGear cards have served me well for the last
year or so.  It was worse when we had 5 stations on at the new office (before
we got the 100Mbps wiring in), but even then it was usable the majority of the
time.  With Evelyn and I on the net at home, it's fairly rare that we run into
any problems.

Sean
-- 
 It's not a recursive function except in the sense that it calls itself.
                 -- demoncrat on #python, 1999
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python