June 2003
Intermediate to advanced
184 pages
5h 8m
English
Content preview from Building Wireless Community Networks, Second EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 2. Defining Project Scope
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
—Andrew S. Tanenbaum, c.1980
What do you want to accomplish? As a system administrator, this is a question I ask whenever a user comes to me with a new request. It’s easy to get wrapped up in implementation details while forgetting exactly what it is you set out to do in the first place. As projects get more complex, it’s easy to find yourself “spinning your wheels” without actually getting anywhere.
The most common questions I’ve encountered about wireless networking seem to be the simplest:
What is the difference between 802.11a/b/g, 802.16, and 802.1x?
How much does it cost?
How far will it go?
Can I use it to do [fill in the blank]?
The first question is by far the most straightforward to answer—the rest all depend on your application and circumstances. Before we can start building networks, we need to have a clear idea of what we have to work with.
The Standards
Here’s a brief overview of the current (and future) standards that all fall under the 802 family:
- 802.11
The first wireless standard to be defined in the 802 family was 802.11. It was approved by the IEEE in 1997, and defines three possible physical layers: FHSS at 2.4GHz, DSSS at 2.4GHz, and Infrared. 802.11 could achieve data rates of 1 or 2Mbps. 802.11 radios that use DSSS are interoperable with 802.11b and 802.11g radios at those speeds, while FHSS radios and Infrared are obviously not.
- 802.11a
According to the specifications ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.