After I mentioned on either PLUG or ALUG that a local company was looking into providing a wireless internet service based on 802.11g, I had a couple of people asking who this company was.
I can now confirm that the project will be run by Stamford based company 2xp (http://2xp.co.uk) and the webpage of the project is here http://www.wrbb.net
Worringly there have been several messages recently claiming that there are no 802.11g cards yet that run on Linux. I'd love to know if anyone knows any different as I'm very interested in the proposed service.
There was recently a lot of activity on Slashdot regarding this article http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,81450,00.html ?nas=PM-81450 which claims that the latest (and possibly final) draft specification released for 802.11g by the IEE will drop the original 54 meg speed to around 20 meg, quite a significant difference.
2xp, the Stamford company got in touch with the IEE and the following text is from here http://www.sourcewire.com/sub_releases/search_results.php?id=16844&hilit...
"WRBB technical staff visiting the WiFi Exhibition in Olympia have been in contact with Dennis Eaton (Chair of the WiFi Alliance) and Nicholas Sargologos (Prism Product Marketing) who are both voting members of the IEEE 802.11g Committee and have been assured that this is not the case.
The standards are to be ratified at the end of June and the voting members assured WRBB that "there is a less than 2% chance of the standard being downgraded".
Sorry if this seems a little off topic, but my main concern is that I won't be able to use the proposed wireless internet in Linux. Perhaps there are some 802.11b products that run on Linux and will be compatible with the service?
Regards Ben "tola" Francis
On Friday 23 May 2003 15:06, Ben Francis wrote:
Worringly there have been several messages recently claiming that there are no 802.11g cards yet that run on Linux. I'd love to know if anyone knows any different as I'm very interested in the proposed service.
I didn't mean to worry you too much Ben :o) One possibility is that you could use a 802.11g Access Point in client mode (I know that at least some of the D -Link ones support this) then simply connect to your machine via ethernet. Actually in some respects this may be a better option if you wanted to let more than one machine use this service. Of course whether or not 2xp (or their infrastructure) would support this is another matter.
There was recently a lot of activity on Slashdot regarding this article http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,81450,00.htm l ?nas=PM-81450 which claims that the latest (and possibly final) draft specification released for 802.11g by the IEE will drop the original 54 meg speed to around 20 meg, quite a significant difference.
Yes I was reading that today, quite worrying isn't it. I heard that it's partly to do with interoperation issues between b and g· which is odd as the two are supposed to be compatable.
Sorry if this seems a little off topic, but my main concern is that I won't be able to use the proposed wireless internet in Linux. Perhaps there are some 802.11b products that run on Linux and will be compatible with the service?
Again 802.11g is supposed to be backward compatable. A 802.11b card should be able to associate with a 802.11g Access point. So this should be possible. (again if the provider and their infrastructure support it)
Regards Wayne
----- Original Message ----- From: "Wayne Stallwood" wayne.stallwood@btinternet.com To: "ALUG" main@lists.alug.org.uk Sent: Friday, May 23, 2003 6:30 PM Subject: Re: [Alug]Wireless Rural Broadband
On Friday 23 May 2003 15:06, Ben Francis wrote:
Worringly there have been several messages recently claiming that there
are
no 802.11g cards yet that run on Linux. I'd love to know if anyone knows any different as I'm very interested in the proposed service.
Another reference is
http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~pliszka/hints/wireless.html
This guy is regarded as an authority on the subject of wireless. In theory the instructions here will get a USB wifi adapter working, but I haven't succeeded yet.
-- GT
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Ben Francis -
Graham Trott -
Wayne Stallwood