Opinion: WiFi woes

Hey, even if it doesn’t you can just sell the punters some more kit until it all works fine, OK? NOT! Once again vendors leave it to the resellers to sort out their incompatible crap. And after the third attempt at making WiFi work at anywhere near the speeds we were first promised, would you think they’d have sorted out backward compatibility by now? Guess not.

Yeah, yeah, stop blogging already, we know it’s backward compatible with 802.11g in that it works with the older stuff, but it makes everything operate at the speed of the old WiFi cards. This is just plain ridiculous. The only way you can get the benefit of the new high-speed 802.11n is to make sure there are no 802.11g users on your network. Just a tad inconvenient? And how exactly are we supposed to sell this stuff to punters? Just tell them they need to upgrade EVERY WiFi card in the place all at once?

This must be the fantasy world where every reseller has customers with open cheque books and enough spare time to do lunch at Level 40. Yeah, we know, but who can afford Level 41? We thought we could be we just had to give a refund on a bunch of 802.11n kit to an irate customer who was less than impressed with getting exactly the same speed as before. Yeah, sure, but who has got the time to go onsite and handhold their way through a $200 sales prospect? That won’t even buy lunch at Mickey D’s.