Hardware tips from the school of hard knocks.

802.11a - Another New Technology That Doesn't Live Up to it's Promise - Yet

Hardware tips from the school of hard knocks.

• Don't buy any Enlight cases if the 5.25 inch drives require special spring clips for mounting. Enlight doesn't give you any spares and nobody in the world sells them except some ripoff secondary market places for $7 to $10 per pair. For three drives it will cost you almost as much as the case itself.
• Don't buy new plug-and-play Ethernet cards for old (pre-1996) machines. We have found that cheaper new cards, such as the NetGear FA310TX work great in newer machines, but can't be configured in the older ones. It seems as if the older BIOS won't detect the settings properly and there is no way to set them manually. There may be a way to get them to work, but we couldn't find it.

Someday....

802.11a - Another New Technology That Doesn't Live Up to it's Promise - Yet

by Greg Hill

May 20, 2002. It sounds like a dream come true: a wireless connection at up to 72 Megabits per second (in "turbo mode", 54Mbps normally), nearly 7 times 802.11b wireless. It also claims an operating range of 1,650 feet! All 802.11b units use the 5-GHz radio band, rather than the 2.4-GHz band used by 802.11b devices and other common equipment, like cordless phones, which may interfere with one another.

Recently, I had the chance to try out one of the first of these units on the market, SMC's EZ Connect™802.11a Wireless Access Point (SMC2755W). Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the results.

Thankfully, the setup road was well-traveled by the time I got the unit, so I didn't have go through that ordeal. The person who did the setup didn't have a lot of good things to say about the documentation, which was sketchy at best and inaccurate at worst including the printing of the wrong password. He did have praise for the support people who were difficult to get hold of, but once reached, knew their stuff.

I plugged the access point into an SMC 100 Mbps switch in the basement and connected the "wall wart" power supply. Then, I  inserted the network card into a Toshiba laptop. Windows XP Professional prompted for drivers and I inserted the CDROM and keyed the values thoughtfully provided for me by my colleague.

Once it was connected and configured, the wireless network worked only sporadically. Some web pages appeared with randomly missing items, sometimes text, sometimes graphics, and some pages even displayed without any links. According to the connection icon on Windows, the speed started out at 72 Mbps, then fluctuated between the 20's and 40's. But the worst part was the continuous appearance and disappearance of the "cable disconnected" message, with the attendant interruption of whatever I was doing at the time. I tried changing the access point to non-turbo mode, which required a complete shutdown, with no appreciable improvement. Changing the position of the antennae or the location of the access point yielded little if, any difference. So, I didn't have a blissful weekend of carrying my computer out on deck, into the bedroom or even halfway down the street, according to the specs. Instead, I sat about 20 feet away from the device, trying every possible combination of configuration properties and physical locations, amused at first, frustrated at last. Fortunately, I was forewarned by my colleague who tried it previously and by an article in the May 21, 2002 issue of PC Magazine.  Both sources warned of encountering similar problems.

So, my advice would be to wait on the 802.11a and go with the 802.11b in the short term. Users acknowledge that it is slower, but stable in performance. Also the price is less than $200 for an access point and PCCard, versus over $500 for the potentially faster 802.11a product.