Julian Thomas wrote:
On Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:31:33 -0400 fred smith wrote:
David McGuffey wrote:
Have decided to give up on the embedded Broadcom 4312 wireless device in my son's Dell laptop. I get WEP open authentication to work, but nothing else. I was about to dump the bcm43xx kernel module and the bcm43xx-microcode5.fw firmware and work with the newer b43 module and associated firmware. However, he claims that at school, he has always had intermittent problems with wireless under Vista and wants an external device (USB or PCMCIA).
Why not look at a small access point that plugs into the RJ45 and uses USB for power? DLink DWL-G730AP or other equivalent.
If it really is an AP, it won't do the job, as an AP cannot be a client to another AP. 802.11 DOES have the concept of a wireless backbone, called WDS (wireless distribution system), but it is not yet defined (Work In Progress: 802.11s, I am a contributor to the security features). So each vendor has its own WDS implementation (MIT's OnePC implements part of draft 1 of 802.11s).
Of course there are devices out there that are referred to as wireless bridges (Linksys WRT54g is one) that act as a client and bridges an ethernet as a single client to the AP. Note that a wireless bridge is NOT an AP. Of course there are probably devices out there that can be configured either way....
Note, I work on the 802.11 standards and know them well, but I don't know of all the flavors of implementations out in the wild.