All,
For several months, we've been chasing an elusive issue relating to connectivity problems that many of our users have when accessing 2.48G coverage areas on channel 11. In short, their wireless cards would fail to associate with these sites and AirMagnet would report excess noise in these environments. Spectrum analyzers showed no evidence off excessive noise on this channel in any coverage area so we started to suspect that the noise was being reported erroneously.
Then recently, we found a resource within Cisco that made us aware of a problem with a recent version of the Atheros chipset used by many manufacturers including Cisco, Netgear, D-Link, HP, IBM, NEC and Toshiba. I have not been able to find any additional information about this issue. Neither Cisco nor Atheros seem to not have any publicly available documentation on this subject.
We did find that the University of Tennessee makes a vague reference to this issue in their wireless FAQ. See below:
http://oit.utk.edu/helpdesk/faq.php?section=11#q126
So if what we're hearing is true, it's quite unlikely that we're the lone ranger (although sometimes I wonder). Have others experienced this issue? Does anyone have any documentation that they can share on this issue? Are there other wireless NICs (beyond what is mentioned above) that we should make users aware of? Are these vendors releasing any firmware updates to resolve this issue (Cisco is just RMA'ing these cards).
Scott Genung Manager of Networking Systems Telecommunications and Networking Illinois State University 124 Julian Hall Normal, IL 61790-3500
Phone: (309)438-7258 Web: http://www.tel.ilstu.edu
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