Which wireless card?

[John Summerfied]

Sasa Stupar wrote:
> Jay Lee wrote:
> 
>> Sasa Stupar wrote:
>>
>>> I am thinking to move my server (FC3) from the office room to a 
>>> basement and to connect it via wireless network. I am just wondering 
>>> which PCI cards (or USB) works well under FC3 and are not very 
>>> complicated to setup? I have a Netgear wi-fi router WGT624GR.
>>
>>
>>
>> I really wouldn't suggest this.  Wireless is great but at it's best 
>> it's not going to be as reliable and fast as good ol' CAT5.  At it's 
>> worst, you'll get dropped server connections, poor performance, data 
>> corruption, lots of bad things.  Put your wireless AP|router in the 
>> basement and the server right next to it, connection via CAT5.  As far 
>> as card recommendations, Atheros based chips work pretty well with the 
>> madwifi driver.
>>
> I can't move my router into basement since I don't have a line there so 
> that's why I wanted to use wireless. I really don't need speed of CAT5 
> (100Mbit) but this router can manage up to 108 Mbit link (if you are 
> close enough) and my distance will be 10 meters with two brick walls so 
> I think it shouldn't drop link to less than 54 Mbit.
> Atheros based chips - well if I by card over internet I really don't 
> know if it has this kind of chips since this is not advertised in the 
> selling leaflet.


There is some doubt in my mind whether the signal will get there. I've 
found two brick walls too much of a challenge:-)

Then there's speed. My wireless is 5 Mbits/sec. I'm doing a test atm:
manifestdestiny-binary-i386-1.iso 4%   25MB 114.8KB/s 1:28:39 ETA

Speed ranges from less than 100 Mbytes/sec to a little over 300. My boss 
(with Apples and Airport Extreme)  found his ADSL connexion faster

Speed between two wireless machines is worse, the traffic has to make 
two wireless hops to/form the one AP, and for reasons that went over my 
head this goes to swamp the AP. There is some discussion on this in WA 
Freenet (Google is your friend).

Cards based on prism54 (see www.prism54.org) and Atheros (madwifi) 
chipsets work well, and I think Intel's Centrino too.

Avoid TI and Broadcom.

Dlink has been labelling its products recently, identifying which have 
Atheros and which have TI. Atheros does 11.{a,b,g}.

Note that 11a uses 5 Ghz and may penetrate walls better (or worse) than 
{a,b} using 2.5 Ghz. However, if it comes to acquiring external 
antennae, you need one suited to your frequency: one designed for 
11{b,g} won't perform so well at 5 Ghz and vv.






-- 

Cheers
John

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