My suggestion - which is worth just what you paid for it - is keep your 802.11 area clean of other 2.4G transmitters. Clean the door seal on the microwave oven. Buy 900 Mhz phones (I have 4 Senao's and LOVE them! - external antennas and I can walk the dog 8 blocks any direction and take/ make calls) - avoid anything 2.4 G - even if it claims to work with 802.11x
The simple reason is that having another transmitter nearby a very sensitive receiver is that even if they are NOT on the same frequency, the nearby xmitter will overpower the sensitive receiver's front end resulting in what is known as "de-sense" or decreasing the sensitivity of the receiver due to a nearby strong signal from the transmitter (phone, video rabbits [rent-a-cop companies like these for spying on suspect employees inside major corporations because they are too lazy to run 75 ohm coax - I watched IT and security duke it out at one major silicon valley firm - the one that started it all - when we found a hidden camera with a spectrum analyzer causing problems for their 802.11b system. Ever find a sprinkler head with a 2.4 G antenna? It's not there for fire protection.) Yep - they're not on the same channel - but the degredation (sic?) is still there to the point that you'd be better off with just a single 802.11x network and nothing else. You might never see it. Or you might have dead spots that otherwise wouldn't be there. Even multiple 802.11x deployments (big buildings for example) need to take into account desense problems. Sectorized antennas and natural attenuators like metal walls help in the engineering of these systems. Just tossing a bunch of cheap APs from fry's into an empty building often results in a bad reputation for 802.11x - people complain bitterly about problems from too many APs improperly installed as too few. One guy I met bought 11 APs from frys with their budget for wireless - put them (you guessed it) on channels 1 through 11 - and tossed them above the dropped ceiling - every 4th tile had an access point. Same SSID on all. Laptops wouldn't stay assoc'ed for more than a few seconds - pages stopped loading mid-page - a real "CF". One well designed AP and antenna system would have done the job better. Protect your 2.4G band from un-needed stuff and you'll get great performance from your 802.11 hardware. Use 900 and 5.8 G if you run 802.11b/g - or if you've got spy cameras that were there first, buy 802.11a! Everett -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
