Upgrading and Repairing Networks

Chapter 21. The IEEE 802.11g Standard

SOME OF THE MAIN TOPICS IN THIS CHAPTER ARE

Overview of the 802.11g Standard 310

Installing a Wireless-G Broadband Router 312

Installing and Configuring a Wireless Network Adapter 321

Proprietary Extensions to the IEEE 802.11g Standard 327

Improving Network Performance with Dual-Band Wireless Technology 328

Which Wireless Protocol Should You Use? 329

The preceding two chapters discussed the first two wireless protocol standards to achieve wide market success at inexpensive prices. Today, IEEE 802.11b hardware is largely obsolete, while IEEE 802.11a hardware is largely restricted to corporate networks. However, this does not mean that IEEE 802.11-based wireless networking is unimportant. Rather, it reflects the overwhelming dominance of the newest wireless networking standard, IEEE 802.11g.

IEEE 802.11g wireless networking is so inexpensive that almost anyone or any business can afford it. PCI, CardBus, and USB adapters are available for about $40$50 each, and many recent notebook computers already include an integrated IEEE 802.11g network adapter. Wireless Access Points (APs) with integrated routers and Ethernet switches are available for less than $50. At these prices, wireless networking is about the same price per system as wired networking, and is even less expensive if you include the cost of rewiring your home or office for a wired network. Because it's easy to interconnect wired and wireless Ethernet clients into a single network, it's worthwhile for you to consider if it's time to add wireless networking to your home or office, or use it as a complete replacement for wired networking.

That said, if you already have an installed base of network cables for users in a wired environment, do you really need wireless networking? Conversely, there are a few scenarios that make wireless networking the best solution. If wireless is for you, the question of which standard to choose arises. Although some variants of wireless networking hardware are now very inexpensive, there are a few relevant considerations you need to think about, such as these:

• All major vendors are shipping IEEE 802.11g hardware. Some are also shipping faster versions, however, including some pre-N and MIMO hardware designed to improve speed and range. If you are building a wireless network from scratch, it might make sense to adopt one of the faster-than-802.11g standards. However, if you are building a wireless network to support laptops with integrated 802.11g network adapters, a faster standard won't necessarily improve the performance of integrated adapters. However, MIMO routers, which use multiple antennas to boost range, can sometimes improve the performance of standard 802.11g clients as well as MIMO-enabled clients.

• IEEE 802.11b provides a data rate of 11Mbps. IEEE 802.11a increases this to 54Mbps, as does IEEE 802.11g.

• The 802.11g standard can interoperate with both 802.11g and 802.11b. Thus, you can obtain a network bandwidth of 54Mbps in the 2.4GHz bandwidth, and use both 11Mbps and 54Mbps in the same network. The 802.11g devices can be used as an upgrade path for 802.11b hardware. Pay as you go, so to speak. Do you really need to use 802.11a if you can achieve the same bandwidth using 802.11g? And 802.11g allows you to start replacing older hardware as you can afford it because it can also work with your legacy 802.11b hardware.

• Cost, of course. However, this is not much of a factor today unless you have a very large wireless network in which replacing several hundred network cards (as well as APs) can add up to a large amount of cash.

The 802.11g standard was approved in 2003.