Length Limitations of SSID on various OSes

[donerb]

I have seen information stating SSID length limitations are 1-32 characters, alphanumeric characters only (no spaces, dashes, or underscores, right?)

What I'm intersted in is whether there are limitations on a OS basis (*nix, Mac OS 8/9, OSX 10.x, Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP, etc) on a client detecting a specific SSID?

For example, when XP detects a new SSID, it pops the name up as an available network, and I have yet to see a problem with longer SSID names (up to 32char). Are there situations with older OSes, or even newer ones, where the detected SSID name will be truncated and not visible to the end user because of hard-coded length limitations?

Or phrased a different way, is there ever a reason (other than ease-of-use in typing in an SSID manually), why you wouldn't want a 32 character SSID?

 

[Nothinman]

On Linux iwconfig has a hard coded limit of 32 characters for the SSID, with the ending null that means you can't have an SSID longer than 31 characters.

You have to be a member of the IEEE to see the PDFs on the standard, so I can't say for sure, but 32 seems to be the maximum that everyone else uses too.