Went to a site today where they've been having poor wireless performance.
There are a number of reasons why they're having problems which I can work on but one other thing I noticed is, although they've setup WEP encryption, they have not setup their own SSID and are connecting to "default".
They are in an area with lots of netwroks so my question is: Is there any potential performance hit by using the "default"?
I cant think why there might be, but would appreciate any informed comments.
Other than the fact that other random laptops might try and associate with the AP automatically there shouldn't be any problem. Something that is more of a problem would be being on the same channel as thoes other AP. Make sure you are on a good clean channel with little activity. Also don't use WEP, use WPA much more secure.
WEP is a bad idea. It's easily cracked. I suggest WPA or WPA2 instead.
If they didn't change the SSID, there's probably a few other things that need to be checked, like the router access password.
No. Wireless, from the clients point of view, is a 1:1 relationship. Under all the acronyms, the actual bridging is done by MAC address, not by SSID. You could have the entire city use the same SSID (as in many metro mesh networks) and there would be no performance problem. There is a real possibility that a client might connect to the wrong access point, or that it might roam to a neighbors system.
Think of how the metro mesh networks are setup. They usually have all the same SSID. Same with University systems and large corporate WLAN's.
Try the incentive plan. Setup the main access point for 802.11g at full speed and using WPA2. Setup a 2nd access point with just WEP using a different SSID. Get a router that supports QoS and throttle the 2nd access point to where it just barely is usable. The Windoze
98 users will soon complain that "it's too slow" and start talking about getting a new machine. If anyone asks why two access points, mumble something about improving security.
Another method that I shoved down one customers throat was to use an external wireless ethernet bridge instead of a PCMCIA card. It wasn't that horrible as I tended to use a travel router, which was quite small. It was clumsy, but it sucessfully delayed upgrading to a new laptop for about 6 months.
Note that there are some USB, PCMCIA, and Card Bus wireless devices that support WPA-PSK under Windoze 98SE. I'm too lazy to dig out some prospective models. You can also install WPA seperately with:
but the wireless device driver must have WPA support.
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