Hi, I was not at the last IETF, and couldn't see live the reportedly bad
workings of WLAN. I am not going to make suggestions to 58crew since
I'm certain they've already tried lots of configurations. Just to share
our thoughts on how we make work several
independent/deterministic-behaviour 802.11b subnets:
-for the general public, set the AP's with both an essid and a key, in
Infrastructure mode (managed).
-for the aodv public, convene to use a different essid and a different
key and ad-hoc mode. If the aodv people need several ad-hoc mode
subnets, just set yet another essid+key; of course all essid's and
key's must be different each compared to the other.
We have experience with several independent/deterministic-behaviour WLAN
links set up that way.
But, even if this works well with several AP types and cards, there
exist cards out there that only support enc at 128bit while others only
at 64bit, which makes _any_ use of encryption non-portable. That says,
if ietf crew decides to put a key 64bit then there will be people not
able to connect. Same if it decides for 128bit.
To me, the whole story is a matter of compatibility, backward
compatibility and forward compatibility between various versions of the
802.11 standards _and_ of their implementations.
It is exactly like with Word versions: it's the same Doc format but not
quite depending on the Windows version too.
I do not think anyone could be blamed of "interfering" with a WLAN
network, most notably because this is unlicensed spectrum; I presume
harmonics of an old microwave oven could be blamed for interference with
the ietf wlan as much as a user not knowing his intel laptop has centrino.
Alex