Brian - The quick answer is they are all the same unless your neighbor happens to use one of them, and then you'll probably only notice his ssid once in a while. 802.11 picked frequencies far enough away from the band edges (which are where the analog cordless phones tend to hang out) that you won't annoy them and they won't bother you.
The long answer is that only channels 1, 6, and 11 are really "channels" in that they don't overlap with others. Looking at the radiated emissions on a spectrum analyzer, you quickly notice that the width of any "channel" is much greater than what the books say (which, incidentally, is how we get 5.5 Mbps out of it). Many people summarize this as 802.11b only has 3 non-overlapping channels. I recently encountered an 802.11 install that was having real noise issues -- I found a broadband non-802.11 source that was frequency hopping all over 2.4G EXCEPT 2442-2499 for some strange reason. Channel 7 happened to use that small "empty" space graciously left behind by the interferance source and suddenly things were working again when we switched to Ch. 7. First time I'd ever used ch. 7 - but I was sure glad it was there! That's really why you have the 11 channels - to combat interferance. Many of the nicer APs will go look for a "clear" channel for you and pick the best (cisco does this well) - It sure beats lugging a 60 lb spectrum analyzer to the site and staring at it for 2 hours! Everett > > Quick question: > > If I had a choice between channels 1-11, which one would be the best to use? > The frequency difference seems miniscule but would a lower frequency > (Channel 1 on 2.412 GHz) be better than (Channel 2 on 2.462 GHz?). > > Thanks! > Brian > -- > general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> > [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
