Wireless Fidelity, or 802.11b protocol. See

• Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance http://www.wirelessethernet.org/

• http://80211b.weblogger.com

Surprisingly, not a great standard for compatibility: there's lots of complaints of various mixes of hardware (card vs hub) not talking.

Not very secure right now.

Going to be competing with 802.11a soon.

For reviews of products, etc. see Practically Networked

[OK], time to buy a hub. (Friend gave me a card, which I've confirmed works, now I want to use it at home instead of at Star Bucks. Discovered someone in my building is running an open connection, but I can't receive it, damn concrete highrises...)

The "standard" choice seems to be the LinkSys [Ether Fast] (for $150 from [Pc Connection]). But don't want to be too lazy in making choice. So reading up a bit...

[Glenn Fleishman] has a page of text and matrix of features.

But I start by sorting the [Practically Networked] list of reviews by price. Then focused on entries having a number of user reviews.

• The Belkin [F5D6230]-3 sounds reasonable, except for the 50% reduction in throughput when using [WEP] (the access-point-only [F5D6130] doesn't have this problem). But 45% negative reviews (out of 18 users).

• [UMAX]/[MaxGate] 3300. The review (3/2001) notes that it wouldn't work with an Orinoco/Lucent card, which makes me nervous. And 75% negatives.

• The LinkSys [W11S1] sounds [OK], but [Practically Networked] review says [WEP] causes 50% throughput decrease, plus says it only supports 40/60-bit [WEP] instead of 128-bit, contradicting other sources including Glenn's matrix (actually, the original review was 3/2001, and it notes that a later firmware upgrade added 128-bit - but they didn't re-test throughput effects - might they be even worse at high level of encryption?)! And gets 42% negative user reviews.

  • the [W11P1] gets lower performance. 69% negative.

• [SMC] Barricade 7004AWBR: 45% [WEP] hit. But only 25% negative! But Glenn's matrix notes that they require you enter (at client sign-in) 14 pairs of hex digits while hiding what you're typing, which makes it easy to make typos and go nuts. It also got a [PcMag] Editors' Choice nod, for whatever that's worth.

• Netgear: 50% negative. 50% [WEP] hit.

• 3Com: 60% negative

The [SMC] is sounding like my choice, for the moment... [OK] I ordered it from buy.com.

WiFi Choices --2003/10/27 15:38 [GMT]
An excellent resource for WiFi is www.nycwireless.org.

Aug'2004 update - [SMC] died (lights still worked, but no more wifi) - walked over to Staples and bought the [NetGear], and have had no problems.

Sept'2004 - in Scott Westerfeld's [So Yesterday] read about someone wearing a WiFi detector as part of her bracelet. But didn't find any such gadget that would be small enough for that. And the [SmartID] unit gets much better reviews, but is quite ugly compared to the Kensington.

Later: swapped [NetGear] hub for a [DLink]

• find it's locked at Channel6 - there are other people in the building using the same channel, so I'd like to switch to something else. There are also sources using channel 11, so I'll try channel 1. I think the channel-6 lock is related to special higher-performance protocols like [SuperG].

  • if I go to the "Advanced/Performance" menu I can change the [SuperG] options. "Static Turbo" keeps the channel-6-lock. "Without Turbo" lets me change the channel.

Later still: I think I swapped again since then, but I'm not even sure. These hubs get hinky over time. Good luck with Municipal Wifi.

User Options Recent Changes Help Page