Lucent's Lightning-Speed Wireless Card
May 17, 1999
By Dave Molta
In the "who's who" of the wireless LAN industry, you'll likely find Lucent Technologies near the top of the list. Hot on the heels of Aironet Wireless Communications' 4800 series, Lucent is presenting its own high-speed wireless LAN system, the WaveLAN/IEEE Turbo PC Card. Supporting a raw data rate of 11 Mbps, the WaveLAN/IEEE Turbo blows the doors off the vendor's earlier standard 2-Mbps IEEE 802.11 WaveLAN offering, achieving single-station FTP throughput nearly four times faster.
Although I initially experienced some performance problems with the dual-card access-point architecture, I easily resolved them by installing high-gain antennas. And despite this concern, I think the product will generate significant interest, particularly among you WaveLAN users; the WaveLAN/IEEE Turbo will be an easy, cost-effective upgrade.
I prefer the flexibility of the Aironet PC Card's removable antenna to Lucent's fixed-antenna configuration. I also like Aironet's pledge of firmware upgradability to the new IEEE 802.11 high-speed standard due later this year. However, in light of the Lucent PC Card's $495 price tag--$100 lower than that of the competition--Aironet has a worthy competitor.
Hold on to Your Propellers I tested a beta version of the WaveLAN/IEEE Turbo in our Syracuse University Real-World Labs®. Because I had a Lucent WavePOINT II Access Point (AP) in the lab from a previous review (see "Wired on Wireless: A New Class of 802.11 Devices Go the Distance," www.networkcomputing.com/1006/1006r2.html), Lucent simply sent us two of its WaveLAN/IEEE Turbo PC Cards. Unlike many of its competitors, this vendor uses a PC Card designed for notebook computers to serve as the wireless LAN interface in its AP. The flexibility of that approach was obvious: I was able to easily support both older and newer cards in the same AP. After connecting to the WavePOINT II AP using the older cards, I installed new software and firmware provided by Lucent via its WaveMANAGER/AP management software, which is included with the product. Sliding the old 802.11 WaveLAN card out of the AP, I replaced it with the new Turbo card and restarted the WavePOINT AP.
Installing the new Turbo PC Card in our Compaq Computer Corp. Armada 7800 notebook was as smooth as I expected. Lucent has developed new drivers for WaveLAN that improve its interface, while adding support for new features, including high-speed 11-Mbps operation and power management.
My first test involved the transfer of an 18.6-MB binary file via FTP from a Sun SPARC 10 server. I used IPSwitch's WS-FTP software to perform this transfer, and the throughput clocked in at 4.6 Mbps. This amounts to about 60 percent of the 7.5-Mbps throughput we achieved using a 3Com Corp. 3C562 Ethernet NIC. Transfers to the server didn't fare quite as well, averaging 2.6 Mbps for the Turbo card versus 6.9 Mbps for the 3Com Ethernet card.
To evaluate interoperability of the Turbo card with older IEEE 802.11 devices, I tested a standard WaveLAN NIC installed in the Armada that was connected to the WavePOINT II AP configured with a Turbo card interface. Transfers from the Sun server measured 1.24 Mbps, while transfers to the Sun server averaged 1.15 Mbps. These numbers were similar to the results of testing done with a standard WaveLAN card installed in the WavePOINT II.
Twice As Much Architecture Support One of WavePOINT II AP's unique characteristics is its dual PC Card slot architecture. The two slots can support different wireless LAN architectures (older 900-MHz cards and newer 2.4-GHz cards, for example) or multiple wireless LANs operating on non-overlapping radio channels. To evaluate these capabilities, I installed a standard IEEE 802.11 WaveLAN card in one slot and configured it to use Radio Channel 1. In the second slot, I added a Turbo card and configured it to use the non-overlapping Radio Channel 6 with a different network name (ESSID, in 802.11 parlance). I then ran concurrent FTP transfers from identical Armadas to the Sun server. I was surprised that the older 2-Mbps WaveLAN card achieved a throughput of approximately 1 Mbps, while the Turbo card chugged along at about 350 Kbps. Lucent technicians said this was likely a result of interference between the two AP cards. After attaching an optional range extender antenna ($95) to the Turbo PC Card and positioning it about three feet from the AP, I ran these tests again: Both notebooks performed well (4.5 Mbps for the Turbo card and 1.1 Mbps for the IEEE 802.11 WaveLAN card).
Transmission range for the WaveLAN Turbo was about what I had anticipated. Signal quality, as measured by Lucent's WaveMANAGER/Client utility (bundled with the PC Card), dipped into the marginal range at about 100 feet from the WavePOINT AP in a walled-office environment using the standard antennas. An FTP transfer from the Sun server to the Armada notebook at a range of 120 feet resulted in a respectable throughput of 2.4 Mbps.
Send your comments on this article to Dave Molta at dmolta@nwc.com.
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