On Tuesday 26 October 2004 03:40 pm, Chris Weiss wrote:
We're looking to connect our office LANs on two adjacent floors using a wireless connection (the current cat-5 snaking out the window is not going to cut it when the weather _really_ gets sour).
Omnidirectional antennas are *generally* optimized to focus their beams in the horizontal plane. i.e., The beam radiation pattern looks like a squashed donut. Therefore, two devices directly above/below each other will not be able to communicate efficiently because they will be in each others' donut-hole.
This is typically an effect of increased gain, not any "optimization".
Further, the path loss between two devices (antennas) placed directly above each other will be quite low, so even with the loss in directivity, communication will probably still take place.
Amazon's got the Linksys WRT-54G for ~$60/ea...
IMHO: An excellent piece of equipment for residential use but I don't know about commerical applications. WPA (TKIP or AES), DHCP, detachable dual antennas.
It has all this. (Not that I think its much of an AP...)
We'd also like to keep our existing wifi access, which leads to another Q - I've heard that just the presence of 802.11b devices in an 802.11g environment will drop everyone to b speeds, is that right?
For sure if an 11b device associates to an 11g AP, then the AP and its associated 11g STAs must start sending protection frames before any data frame(s).
While this doesn't drop everyone to 11b speeds, it does slow throughput down quite a bit.
The alternative is massive interference for everyone.
Set the different networks on different channels:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1152281,00.asp
What you don't know can hurt you. Most 11g devices don't have enough ACR at the higher modulation rates to allow simultaneous operation on ch11 and ch1. (Anything closer is a bigger mess.)
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