At 12:57 PM 2/15/00 +1030, Mark Prior wrote:
>The package being offered is a WaveLAN IEEE Turbo 11Mbps PC card for
>AU$276.36 (approx US$175). Drivers are available from Lucent for (at
>least) Windows 95, 98, NT, CE, 2000, MacOS and Linux.
I'm certainly not an expert on this stuff, but as it happens I've been
playing around with a bunch of it recently both at home and at work. My
comments below are based on this experience.
Searching for "WaveLAN" at a catalog site shows (prices are in US$):
LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
WaveLAN Turbo 11Mbps Wireless
PC Card Silver; WEP
$159.95
This is the same card as an Apple Airport. It is 802.11 DS, 11Mbps, and
supports Wire Equivalent Privacy (WEP). The idea here is that you need a key to
get on the network, but once you're on you can see all the traffic "on the
wire" that you care to. The Apple softare only lets you set a 40 bit key
(actually what you do is enter a passphrase that is hashed down to 40 bits),
but I believe a 64 bit key is supported by the underlying hardware. I don't
know what the underlying crypto is -- probably DES, which of course means
the key length is really only 56 bits...
Unfortunately the Windows 2000 driver for this card doesn't yet support WEP.
They say they are working on it. Amusingly, the Windows 95/98 driver does
support WEP and it works just fine with an Apple Airport Base Station as long
as you have a Mac with an Airport card to set up the base station to begin
with. (Actually, even that probably isn't required unless you want to enable
WEP or DHCP or NAT or some other option.)
All this stuff about security probably isn't relevant in the IETF context, of
course, but it nice if you what you get also is useful at home where network
security may matter a bunch.
$159 is about the same price I've seen for this card in the US.
LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
WaveLAN Turbo 11Mbps Wireless
PC Card Gold; 128RC4
$176.95
I believe this is the same as the Silver except the crypto is 128 bit.
LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
WaveLan Wireless Bronze PC Card
*While Supplies Last
$235
I believe this card only operates at the slower 1-2 MBps rate. This
is supposed to be compatible with the faster cards but I have not tried one to
make sure.
I believe some of these cards support WEP, but only at 40 bits.
The price here seems way too high -- why not get a silver card instead?
LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES
WaveLAN IEEE Bronze PC Card
*Special Order
$239.95
I don't know what the difference between this and the previous card is, if
any.
Could someone explain the differences between these? Is the first one the
same as what is being offered? If so, it appears to be cheaper to buy it
in the US.
I hope this helps some.
Ned