Re: Real world 802.11x distances

["David Chapman" <david@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I'm trying to ascertain what real world experiences people have of
802.11x
> wireless reception and distances.

Not good, using a notebook with a Draytek 540G at home and I struggle to
get
10 metres between rooms. As the house is only part built I'm able to check
different types of materials, dense concrete block is worse than brick but
what kills it totally is Kingspan. Kingspan is a foil coated foam that is
used extensively in new build houses. It works very well as insulation but
you can imagine what it does to radio signals when the room is effectively
metal lined. Also as you probably know the wireless signal degrades
exponentially so pings and light traffic are fine but copy a media file and
the link crumbles, very frustrating.

I took the same machine to the States last year and did a browse for
networks whilst sitting in a friends house, found 8 of which 3 were wide
open and I got a good half meg connection from one of their neighbours :-)
The houses (California) seem to be built of  a cardboard type product, very
thin and no insulation, and signal was the same inside or out.

> I've been having sneek peaks at a broadband enabled alarm panel -
inbuilt
> webserver, 802.11g camera ready - event recording, X10 interface etc.
etc. -
> looks very interesting and could be a great move forward in the
security
> world.  My real concern is the distance g will work at in a real world
> environment.

We REALLY need a product like that which works. I've decided Comfort is too
much for me but there is a huge gap between bell-and-box systems and
Comfort.
I even went to the big Ifsec show and talked to a few alarm manufactures.
Some are slowly coming around to the idea of broadband connected alarms
with
a web browser interface but the right product isn't there yet (or I
couldn't
find it). One of the manufactures was very proud of their flagship PC
connected system and it turned out all they had done was allow you to read
the event codes down a serial link - but the tech bloke couldn't show it as
his new notebook didn't have a serial port !

David C