Gossip

I'm running at 54 megabits -official!

Unofficially, if you knew who to get it from, you could have been testing Intel's 802.11a access points and cards for some weeks; but it's now official, and the Pro/Wireless 5000 stuff is launched - if not licensed.

This news item comes to you over a 54 megabit wireless link from Munich, where Intel has handed out trial samples of the 802.11a cardbus plug-ins to travelling journalists at the Intel Developer Forum. Isn't it fast? Your faithful Sniffer has left the Boss running the boring old WiFi card, and ... well, is now a bit underwhelmed.

Well, that's it; the excitement can't be experienced by anybody who has already used 802.11b, because of course, there's nothing that will keep up with it. Sniffer could, of course, back up my hard disk to a local store if we had one, and it would go pretty quickly; but then again, there are several dozen of these cards around, and he'd have to share the bandwidth.

And the availability of a "starter kit" is equally not really news; Intel resellers have had them for some weeks, complete with an application form for UK users so that they can apply for the still-necessary site licence - fee £50 per site - necessary to make it legal. And if you want to give credit where it is due, you have to admit that Proxim has already announced its PCI adapter cards, and shown them; while Intel is not offering those till Q3.

But it's the breakthrough; the official launch of the faster standard which we will probably all be using - plus, the dual-standard access point, the PRO/Wireless 2000 LAN Dual Band, is now available too.

And just to really spoil Intel's party, a dual-standard access point - derided by Proxim as "not the way to go" is obsolete, anyway, following the launch of the Microwave Photonics laser-powered access point technology breakthrough. But don't let that ruin your afternoon! Read 54 megabit text here! No extra charge!

It was all far more exciting at the Cannes Film Festival, really, wasn't it?