Forum

  • Hello,
    I always maintain to my students that 11a is superior in most environments as long as they don't currently, or will never have to support an 11b client.

    Comments on your advantages:
    -11g with no protection and 11a have the same throughput in a perfectly clean RF environment. I had the pleasure of teaching a class in an environment that had very little noticeable RF interference and the speeds were nearly identical at about 22Mbps. However, in any normal environment, 11a will smoke 11g because of all of the interference on the 2.4Ghz band.
    -I wouldn't say that 11a doesn't have any interference, but less, at least for now.
    -As far as cracking or hacking tools, the only one right off hand that I can think of that hasn't been built for 11a is a protocol DoS like the Prism test utility. Cracking WEP, LEAP etc can all be done, as well as an RF DoS if you have a high powered transmitter in the 5Ghz range.

    Comments on the disadvantages:
    -They do cost a bit more, I'll give you that.
    -It can have some range limitations, but against a pure 11g (no 11b data rates) network, it actually doesn't have the range loss that you would think. In all reality, range isn't as much of an issue as it used to be. Now that we have to micro cell due to high user density per AP, you purposely cut the range short.
    -True, there are plenty of notebooks out there that don't have 11a cards, but the main problem is that small handheld devices don't support 11a. I believe that this problem is being addressed, but I don't think that there is a widespread solution at this point in time. Ben Miller usually knows the latest and greatest products out there, maybe he can comment on that.

Page 1 of 1
  • 1