IP: Re: more on Intel wants to turn PCs into wireless LAN accesspoints

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 09:59:54 -0400
To: farber@cis.upenn.edu, ip <ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com>
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>
Subject: Re: IP: more on  Intel wants to turn PCs into wireless LAN
  accesspoints 
Cc: Christopher K Davis <ckd@ckdhr.com>

At 08:39 AM 4/13/2002 -0400, Dave Farber wrote:
> > Mac bigots, because they are not technical, frequently get confused by
> > Apple's marketing hype.
>
>This paragraph seems rather gratuitously insulting.  Some of us Mac fans
>are in fact technical (why is OS X so popular at USENIX, otherwise?).

I wish I could retract that phrasing.  In fact, I like Macs, Windows and
Unix for different reasons.  I apologize to all.


> > A Mac with an Airport *cannot* be a true 802.11 access point, because
> > the firmware in the Lucent chipset does not support being an access
> > point.  I won't belabor you with technical details, but being an
> > access point involves quite a few important functions of the 802.11
> > MAC layer (not Mac layer...), which dramatically enhance capacity.
>
>This argument seems to be rather technically flawed, for one very simple
>reason: the original Apple Airport base station is simply an embedded
>486 machine with a PCMCIA slot containing a stock Lucent card.

I may not have been clear.  To be an access point at the MAC level (which
solves a number of problems) one has to have access to use different
firmware in the card, and know the secret APIs of that firmware.  This is
true for Lucent and Intersil 802.11 chipsets (and probably others).   A Mac
doesn't use that firmware, even though it is the same hardware, nor does a
PC.   One has to pay rather *large* license fees to be able to use such
firmware, and that license fee is not paid by the vendors of PCMCIA
cards.  Of course many of the functions, such as forwarding and bridging,
in commercial access point boxes are done in the host processor.  But what
Intel was talking about was moving the MAC functions that are peculiar to
access points into the host, which cannot be done because of IPR
restrictions on the cards in the market today.

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