As some of you may know, the old Enterasys 11b NICs are OEM versions of the old Lucent/Agere Orinoco NICs. Those cards were real work-horses -- very reliable, excellent receive sensitivity, and great driver support. But like most 11b offerings, they are a legacy.
When Proxim bought the Orinoco product line from Agere, they were essentialy buying the brand name. The new multi-band Orinoco cards are based on the Atheros chipset so the only similarity is product name. The vast majority of current a/b/g NICs are based on Atheros chipsets. In most cases, vendors basically ship the Atheros reference design (which is very good, BTW) with very minor software tweaks. In other cases (like Proxim), they do substantially more internal development work, which can be good or bad, depending on how good they are at it. Even Cisco has moved to Atheros. Their 350 NICs were based on the old Intersil PRISM chipset. For a short time, Cisco was selling an 11a NIC based on technology they acquired from Radiata. But today, they appear to be working with Atheros hardware, though they still do a lot of driver/utility development in-house. The other big player in today's NIC market is Broadcom, which has strong relations with notebook manufacturers. Broadcom's strength is their b/g design, which is often the standard WLAN NIC in non-Centrino notebooks. Intel is a force that can't be ignored, but at this point, they are at least a generation behind state-of-the-art. I personaly think that it makes sense for Universities to "certify" NICs internally and explicitly note which NICs are supported, but it's not easy to do that. You have to battle the fact that the low-cost providers like Linksys and Netgear often dual-source their components, so you don't really know whether what you get today is the same as what you get next month. It's also tough to effectively test NICs. We're working with some new technology from a company called Azimuth that allows us to do rate-versus-range and roaming testing in a programmatically controllable RF isolation environment. In most cases, we can do this simply by breaking open the NIC and attaching a cable to a jack. In other cases, it's more complex. We've noted substantial differences in performance, NIC to NIC, but we are just getting started with this stuff. Frank Bulk, one of our grad students here at Syracuse who also subscribes to this list, has quite a bit of experience with this. It's worth noting that this kind of testing, while valuable, has limitations. Most notably, it bypasses the NIC's antennas (that's a potentially big issue, especially with embedded notebook NICs), it doesn't factor in the effects of multipath interference, and it really doesn't address many of the software issues that cause you guys some many support problems. dm > -----Original Message----- > From: 802.11 wireless issues listserv > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of > Jean-Paul Carter > Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 9:24 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] 802.11 Adapter Card Evaluations > > > Just a clarification on a previous post. I got the > compatibility matrix mixed up in my head. The Enterasys B > card requires no drivers for windows xp and is what we use to > debug a students laptop. Once we show them how it works, we > recommend the Enterasys a/b/g card which does require the > drivers to be installed from Enterasys. I have been using a > Enterasys B card since they came out and have been very > impressed with the power consumption and the ability to pull > in a signal. Once the A/B/G version came out, I switched to > that and am also equally impressed. > > John Carter > Senior Network Systems Programmer > IT Services > Indiana Purdue University Ft. Wayne > 2101 Coliseum Blvd > Ft. Wayne IN 46805 > 260 481-5473 > 260 481-4152 fax > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > ********** > Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE > Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/cg/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/cg/.
