IP: more on Intel wants to turn PCs into wireless LAN accesspoints

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

From: Christopher K Davis <ckd () ckdhr com>
Date: 13 Apr 2002 08:11:13 -0400
In-Reply-To: "David Farber"'s message of "Fri, 12 Apr 2002 10:30:51 -0500"

David Farber <dfarber () earthlink net> writes:

> From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
> Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 11:17:35
> To: farber () cis upenn edu, ip-sub-1 () majordomo pobox com
> Subject: Re: IP: more on  Intel wants to turn PCs into wireless LAN
>   accesspoints

> Mac bigots, because they are not technical, frequently get confused by
> Apple's marketing hype.

This paragraph seems rather gratuitously insulting.  Some of us Mac fans
are in fact technical (why is OS X so popular at USENIX, otherwise?).

> A Mac with an Airport *cannot* be a true 802.11 access point, because
> the firmware in the Lucent chipset does not support being an access
> point.  I won't belabor you with technical details, but being an
> access point involves quite a few important functions of the 802.11
> MAC layer (not Mac layer...), which dramatically enhance capacity.

This argument seems to be rather technically flawed, for one very simple
reason: the original Apple Airport base station is simply an embedded
486 machine with a PCMCIA slot containing a stock Lucent card.

This feature has been used to add Lucent external antennas (see
<http://www.vonwentzel.net/ABS/Extender.html> for photos), and on at
least one occasion to acquire a Lucent WaveLAN Silver card when the
local stores were out of stock...as I did a few years back when I
needed a card at USENIX, and Fry's had plenty of base stations but
no separate Lucent cards.  (I kept the base station, since I wanted
one at home anyway.)

Many other access points use a similar architecture, where the base
station uses a PCMCIA slot to provide the wireless connectivity.

Either none of these are "true 802.11 access point[s]", or this argument
has a severe flaw.  I am willing to be convinced that they are
low-capacity SOHO access points, but after having used several of the
base stations, I find it hard to believe that they don't do everything I
would expect from a "true 802.11 access point" -- including bridging.

-- 
Christopher Davis * <ckd-sig () ckdhr com> * <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/ckd/>
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