Wireless LAN: My experiences with 11Mb wireless

[pm]

Wireless isn't exactly commonplace yet, so I thought that I'd post my experiences in case anyone is curious.

We have cable internet and a router. I wired only a two rooms in our house with CAT5, my wife's office and the guest bedroom. I use the guest bedroom as my "office" and generally hack around with my computers in that room. The problem is that, since it's the guest bedroom, I keep getting kicked out of it whenever a guest appears and then I lose home 'net access for their visit.

So I started thinking about wiring a few more rooms, but I hate doing wiring - especially in winter when it's cold. So I was reading around and started thinking about wireless. I decided 11Mb (802.11b) wireless was too expensive, but I kept my eyes open anyway. About a week ago I was on E*bay and I say an IBM 802.11b wireless bridge auction that was closing soon with a peak bid of $80. In the end, it went for $225, but I won. The surplus house that sold it indicated that it came from a DotCom that went belly-up. IBM sells the cards for this unit for $180, but I noticed that the box is actually manufactured by Lucent and the cards they sell for the same unit are $130, so I picked up one.

Installation was a breeze. I set it up in transparent mode, and hooked it up into my Linksys BEFSR41. My laptop detected the card, grabbed a DHCP-assigned IP address from the Linksys router and I was up and running in an evening. The bandwidth is very close to the advertised 11Mb even when there are a few walls in the way. Latency overhead is very low - it seemed to be 1-2ms. I turned on the 64-bit encryption and this seemed to reduce the bandwidth slightly. Then I transferred a file to another computer and started walking down the street (yeah, I looked very silly). I noticed that bandwidth degraded in essentially a step function... I had 11Mb until I was about 200ft away (3 walls in the way), then packet loss started increasing and the bandwidth started to drop, then the card switched over and we dropped to 5.5Mb, and then down to 2.2Mb, and finally 1Mb. Still, I got a good 800ft or so from the house before I totally lost the connection. And then when I walked back in range, the card automatically redetected the network. Security seems pretty good. It's spread-spectrum, you need to know the network name to get on, and the system that I have has 64-bit key encryption - which is pretty solid for a home system.

So my experience has been extremely positive. Of course this is all pretty expensive gear (my package would have cost $1190 from IBM and $730 from Lucent), but still I had thought that wireless was pretty useless if you couldn't see computer to computer in the same room. 802.11b seems pretty robust, pretty secure and very fast. I can sit out in the backyard on a hammock, surf the net and listen to stream'd MP3's from my primary computer. Keep an eye on E*bay... there are some good auctions going on wireless stuff there.

Edit: Fixed all the 803.11b bits to 802.11b. Also, on E*bay last weekend, another one of these IBM (remarked Lucent) 802.11b access points auctioned off at $255. I'm not a big fan of E*Bay - in fact I've been ripped off several times - but it's worth watching over there.

 

[Eug]

Dammit... 800 feet! That's pretty good. Interestingly, the home versions of what you got are only a little more than what you paid, but I don't think they'd get anywhere near that kind of range. With that kind of range I hope you're always running it encrypted.

I gotta get myself one of these. Wouldn't it be nice sitting on the rooftop patio surfing wirelessly? Plus that would make me the most geekified of all of my friends. I've already got Ethernet 10/100 Mbps, HomePNA 1/10 Mbps, a laptop with both, and a networked MP3 receiver with both. Wireless would just make complete.

P.S. It's 802.11b.

 

[WoundedWallet]

Thanks pm, that's exactly waht I wanted to hear.

While scoring a good Access Point on Dday maybe a little tough, I'm sure that the cheap stuff(Linksys) can't be too far from what you reported. Even at 25% of what you got will be good for me.

My last attempt with an Acer wireless(don't know the protocol) were very disappointing and I was a little skeptical on trying again. But now I think I'll be doing some tests soon with a Linksys.

 

[spidey07]

Your experience is exaclty how wireless works. Thank goodness you got a good access point and good cards. I think the step rates are 11, 5.5, 2, 1 Mbs for 802.11b.

When I tested some wireless gear for a few production plants by far you get what you pay for.

Lucent/cisco aironet gear = pass thru walls, walk down the street, etc. Everything works great and good reception (has everything to do with the antenna and power supplied)

Netgear = failed miserably, probably do to antenna reception. (I forget but the lucent and cisco gear have something like 8 db of singnal, while netgear has a miserable 1.5. somebody correct me please)

Bottom line, wireless is still pretty new (I hate it personally-too slow) you get what you pay for.

 

[Shadow07]

Spidey, at 8wire we had the Orinoco system (the Lucent access point) with the Gold and Silver cards, and let me tell you, I LOVED IT! In fact, I miss it very VERY much . I loved getting up from my desk with my laptop and going outside to work .

If you get the Cisco or Orinoco or even the Enteresys, they are great. Of course, with the Cisco and Orinoco you will spend the pretty penny.

 

[IcemanJer]

Our campus (Dartmouth College) is going complete wireless (with existing wired network still in tact, of course) by the middle of April using Cisco System's.. well, everything: PC card, transmitter, router... Our news release.

I'll post our experience with it when the time comes around.

 

[pm]

Sorry about the 803.11b => 802.11b confusion...

My setup is essentially a remarked Orinoco solution - the IBM Wireless router is a remarked Lucent Orinoco box (take the cover off of the IBM and you can read Lucent WavePoint-II which is what the Orinoco boxes used to be called), and the cards that I'm using are Orinoco silver cards (silver => 64-bit encryption, gold => 128-bit encryption for the curious).

I've been playing around a lot with it and I still have no complaints at all. I have noticed that if I put the laptop on top of a mattress, it starts to lose connection with the transmitter in my basement. It must be the coils in the bed itself... still if I have it on my lap or a pillow, it's perfect. The system is great.

I was reading that the setup that I have has support under Linux too.

 

[Eug]

I wonder how the Linky and D-Links compare with the Orinoco, and with the Apple Airport (which has Lucent internally).

All I know about the Airport is that it worked fine in a big open room 75 feet away, but that's not much of a test.

All I really want is to be have rock solid support 50 feet away through floors/walls. My home office is on the 3rd floor. My front door is on the first floor, and my living room is on the second floor. The patio is on the roof, just above my office. 800 feet would be cool, since there's a park a few hundred feet away, but there are too many walls and thus I'd probably get no reception with any of the access points.

I've been tempted just to get an Airport, but PC compatible software is 3rd party, and it probably has nowhere near the range of that IBM/Lucent one, since form-factor is a big concern here.

But, they're still too expensive for me, especially considering that all my phone jacks are already networked with HomePNA.

By the way, anybody else have problems understanding what the reviews mean on Practially Networked? A lot of his reviews for APs show significant data loss, but he doesn't seem to make much of that.

 

[pm]

Yeah, my understanding is that the Airport is the same hardware as what I have. I'm actually amused at how all these companies take the same hardware and put their own labels on it and then charge dramatically different amounts for the exact same thing.

I wonder if you can get the Airport and then download the Lucent software for use on it. I didn't like the IBM software that came with mine (slow and it tended to freeze for periods of time), so I downloaded the Lucent software and it works much better. That's what I'm using. The hardware was exactly the same, so I figured it couldn't hurt. Heck, I flashed the firmware with the Lucent version too.

My router and the access point are located in my basement next to my router and the cable modem. It's a terrible place from the perspective of radio transmission (it's about 5 feet from a huge furnace and it's surround on two sides with cement walls, and the roof is covered with furnace venting). I put there as a test (it's the easiest spot for me) but I thought it would never work practically. No problems around the house - although I tried my test of walking down the street and it didn't work half as well this time (line of sight there was be a good 15-20 feet of dirt between the laptop and the AP at a shallow angle)

 

[jartit]

I've been fortunate enough to be able to use 802.11b networking at school (Airport), and it was really cool the first time I saw it. Some of the "wow" factor wore off, but it works.

My school has begun to deploy Airport extensively throughout the school. Each part of the school has a "fleet" of iBooks with the Airport cards. So far, it's worked as well as advertised. Teacher brings out the laptops, we use them in class from our desks with no cables. Generally one access point seems enough per building, which is a range of about 100 feet or so, and that's through stone walls, doors, windows, floors, etc. Performance is decent; with a room full of 15 iBooks the network seems almost as fast as ethernet, with the base station in another room.

An interesting thing to note is that it still works well even when cellular reception is not too good on campus.

 

[spidey07]

yeah, wireless is cool.

too bad is is just so darn slow. very poor multimedia support (just did testing today on a 2.0 megabit stream.) Looked awful.

 

[IJump]

We are just finishing up a conference where wireless was implemeted for people moving around between classrooms and the exibit hall floor. It has been a surprising success. Even moving from one access point to another while moving through the conference center has worked rather well. We are using mostly Nortel equipment with some Cisco stuff thrown in.

The biggest problem after we got it set up and running (wich took about a day and a half for approx 10-15 access points) was when someone kicked a wire loose from one of the remote access points and blacked out an area. Not big deal, we plugged it back in.

 

[DrJeff]

The setup you describe is what I have been dreaming up, but I have a question. If you have an access point (802.11b) and a notebook with the wireless PCMCIA card, does this all recognize the Ethernet switch and all of the wired machine's resources practically PNP? I need the laptop to browse using the cablemodem's bandwidth in the back yard or any room in the house, as well as be able to use a burner, HD or laser on any of the wired machines. Sounds like the D-Link AP1000 access point and one of their 650 wireless PCMCIA cards would do the trick on a budget. Does anyone have any warnings about this hardware?

Thanks,
Jeff