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by Brad Wilson.
Original Post: A Cautionary Tale of 802.11g
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I imagine some of you are now using 802.11g in your house. We are. I have two sets of 802.11g going on.
The primary is a Linksys WRT54G, which does 802.11g for client devices (laptop, etc.), as well as routing of our fixed wireless service (also 2.4GHz, but not 802.11-based).
We also have three 802.11g WAPs, which are bridging some wired pieces of the house (especially valuable for non-wireless devices like the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and Audiotron). Two of these WAPs we've had for a little while, bridging the office (with the router) to the home theater (with the above mentioned equipment). I struggled to get an 802.11g card into my desktop, but it must be ultra-noisy, because neither 802.11g nor 802.11b cards would cut it. So I bought the third WAP and, when I rearranged my desk today, put it to use to bridge my desktop machine.
Unfortunately, this third bridged WAP had older firmware than the other two, so it didn't want to connect up. Off I went to the Linksys site, and downloaded the 1.08 firmware, and upgraded all three. They all worked spankingly well. And then, about 10 minutes later, the wireless router stopped working. Everything 802.11 was freaking out.
As near as I can guess, the new firmware in the WAPs is colliding with the old firmware in the wireless router. The WAPs are now on the 802.11g final standard, and the wireless router is still on the old 802.11g draft standard. There must be some bad interaction, because as soon as I unplugged all the WAPs, then the wireless router settled down and became stable again.
So I guess my next step is to upgrade all the 802.11g devices to their newest drivers/firmware, so that the wireless router can run the final 802.11g spec stuff, and hope that the collisions have gone away. Otherwise, this is going to be one annoying call to Linksys Tech Support... :-p
Oh, and in case you're wondering: the devices are on different channels. The wireless router, which provides general 802.11g support, is on its default channel 6, whereas the WAPs are on channel 9.
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