Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[CombJelly]

"as long as security keeps sucking in 802.11 land, I'll never think of it as a finished product."

The problems are much deeper than that. Security won't be solved as long as they broadcast headers in the clear. Ok, something like ipsec can be used to do end to end encoding and that can be pretty secure. But the format is inherently flawed from a security point of view.

One of my personal beefs is that it broadcasts headers at the lowest data rate. For 802.11g this can mean that unless you use very large packets the bandwidth is dominated by packet headers. When I did an analysis on my project for offloading most of VoIP onto a FPGA, I found that about 60% of the bandwidth was being used for packet headers. And that was using 802.11b at 11Mb.

But there are other problems that don't even have theoretical solutions. For example, it would be nice to be able to route across an ad-hoc networks without requiring access points and a wired network. There is even a standard for it, but it has some small problems. If the network is the fairly fluid it can flood the network with bookkeeping packets. Or fail to route. Or both.