Wireless Madness
“We have tested many of the 802.11b wireless cards on campus [Del Mar College]. Our buildings
are mostly brick with aluminum studs in the walls and every other room is filled with computers; it is a harsh environment. In testing the effective range of 802.11b cards, the Cisco wireless card came out on top, but at $40-$60 higher than most of the others. To our surprise, in second place, came the inexpensive NetGear MA401 card. The Cisco and NetGear cards maintained the 11Mbps connection for much greater distances than did either of the Gold or Silver ORiNOCO wireless PC cards - which had a tendency to drop to 5.5 or even 2Mbps at half the distance of the Cisco or NetGear cards.” [Prof. Michael P. Harris, CCNA, CCAI, Cisco Networking Academy]
Everything on the planet could beat a Linksys card. Even my grandmother is faster than a Linksys Wi-Fi card. And she has macular degeneration! Some Gnomie (Mike Sloane) is sending me an extra Avaya Wireless Gold Card he had lying around. It uses the Orinoco chipset, so I should be set. And if it doesn't work well, I'm out nothing.
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6 Comments
Anonymous
March 6th, 2002
at 5:48am
Really? Assuming that the MA401 is really as good as Prof. Harris says…I was under the impression that it was almost the same card as the Linksys. In fact, I have an MA401 and am using drivers for the Linsys WPC11 because Netgear's drivers don't work just right at my college's network. Am I mistaken in my assumption of the similarity in the two cards?
Anonymous
March 6th, 2002
at 9:12am
Chris,
Is there a link for more info from Prof. Harris?
Anonymous
March 6th, 2002
at 9:12am
Cisco makes a chipset, Lucent makes a chipset and there might be one other big chipset company for these cards I can't think of, but otherwise they're all pretty similar. They are designed a little differently and that can affect range though.
Anonymous
March 6th, 2002
at 5:23pm
my mom just bought a linksys card for her newly wireless-ized place. but the stupid linksys cards sucks a nut, apparently. oh well…what are you going to do?
SocioBiblog
June 16th, 2007
at 10:23am
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Cell Thug
December 4th, 2007
at 5:55am
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