So Much For Adhering To IEEE 802.11 Standards

Last week, I had occasion to switch out laptops for one of my company’s field salespeople. She happened to live just a couple miles from where I live in Chicago, so it was really easy for me to pay her a house call. We lease our Dell laptops, with laptops on a 24 month cycle (desktops are on 36 month leases).

My colleagues in our Atlanta headquarters got her new Latitude D430, dropped a standard image on it, and did some initial user customization. Then they shipped it up to her home, and I scheduled my house call so I could transfer local data from the old laptop to the new one and make sure everything worked.

I went to connect the new D430 to her Wireless LAN (powered by a Netgear WGR614v5), and I couldn’t connect. She had it setup with basic WEP encryption, and I had the WEP key handy, but every time I tried to connect to the network, I kept getting a weird error that the network was not available (even though it was listed in the “available wireless networks list” and I was 6 feet away from the router).

So I logged into the router’s setup menu from her old laptop, which was actually connected to one of the wired LAN ports on the router to confirm the various settings. I even temporarily disabled wireless security, then tried connecting again from the new laptop, and still was unable to. I noticed that the firmware for the router was pretty outdated, so I downloaded and installed the latest firmware from Netgear for that model router. I re-attempted to connect from the D430, and it still failed. Finally, I decided I was losing too much time messing around with this, and plugged in the new laptop to a wired Ethernet port so I could begin copying files over the LAN from the old laptop. I would tackle the wireless issue later.

In a short time, I got everything moved over from the old laptop to the new one. I pulled the old laptop from the docking station and plugged in the D430 into the dock. The Latitude D410 was able to connect to the WLAN just fine. I then tried to connect my own Latitude D630 to the WLAN, and it failed just like the D430. I happened to have my iPod Touch with me, so I tried connecting it to the WLAN, and it also failed. She had her husband’s Wi-Fi enabled Palm PDA nearby, and it was able to connect.

So I quickly determined that the Intel Pro Wireless LAN adapter in both the D430 and my D630 were simply incompatible with the Netgear router. The D410 had a Dell Wireless NIC and it worked fine. I’d seen this once or twice before, when a certain brand and/or model of wireless router doesn’t play well with another brand and/or model of Wireless adapter. Who really knows which side of the fence is the culprit, the router or the client adapter. Perhaps both. Whatever the case, it is still very annoying that this happens at all.

I knew she wanted to be able to use her new laptop away from her desk, so I recommended she get a Linksys router, simply because I use one at home and know it works well with all my Dell equipment. She sent me a follow up e-mail just yesterday to let me know she did get a new Linksys router, and everything is indeed working perfectly.

Tags: 802.11, ieee