Re: alt.net.wireless.NOT.FILLED.WITH ANAL RETENTIVE.PRICKS

John Navas <spamfilter0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> hath wroth:

- The WEP ASCII to Hex conversion mess is still epidemic.
Don't use WEP.

Right. Just junk all the ancient legacy 802.11b only hardware. I
have quite a collection of Orinoco Classic Silver cards. Sorry, but
WEP isn't just going to disappear overnight. The problem is that the
ASCII to Hex conversion mess has been around much longer than WPA. It
should have been fixed, standardized, and identified long ago. If you
dig through the various support web piles, you'll find nothing on the
topic. That's because it almost always happens when a user buys a
mixture of equipment from different vendors. The manufacturers don't
want to support a different vendors hardware, or deal with hetrogenous
systems, so they ignore problem.

- I still have compatibility issues with WPA, even with allegedly
Wi-Fi certified products.
Rare in my experience. Much lower than WEP problems at a comparable maturity
point.

Well, I only see the broken hardware. I'm sure that there are many
people out there that have a satisfactory out of the box experience,
but not when I get involved. Many such issues are fixed by firmware
or driver updates. The customers never do these unless assisted or
armtwisted by a knowledgeable person. Sometime, I'm in a hurry and
just install everything using the CD in box. Then, I fight stupid
problems until I remember to update everything.

- The numerous forms of 108Mbit/sec and MIMO are not compatible.
They are compatible at the 802.11g level.
While there are still problems, I nonetheless think interoperability has
greatly improved.

I'm sure the purchaser of a 108Mbit/sec or MIMO compatible wireless
card will the thrilled to know that the added cost of the card is
generally wasted because it only works with a compatible access point.
Of course, none of this stuff will be compatible with the inevitable
802.11n specification.

As for improved compatibility, methinks you're 99% correct. However,
I keep running into card and access point combinations that result in
odd compatibility issues. For example, a DWL-G630 card and my
BEFW11s4 v4 will contantly connect and disconnet at about a 15 second
rate. Both devices work just fine with a variety of other wireless
devices, but not this combination.

Many older products have been improved with firmware updates.

Many older products have remained frozen with permanent frimware bugs.
In general, the way the vendors have fixed such problems is to replace
the buggy older product with a completely different model from a
different vendor. When the product design cycle is less than the
product sales lifetime, there's always a temptation to ignore problems
and just offer the customer the new and improved model instead.

I'm quite serious. I've installed many SonicWALL products, and they have been
easy to setup and configure, by and large, especially as compared to low-end
products. You only need to get complicated if you want to do something the
low-end products can't do at all.

I think that's roughly what I said. The simple stuff is simple across
the board with most vendors. The added features that justify buying a
Sonicwall are not quite so simple.

Even good companies can make bad choices. Regardless, I suspect the basic
issue there was cost pressure, brought on by a market driven mostly by price
for a given feature set; i.e., we probably only have ourselves to blame.

I know a bit more about what happened with the WRT54G v5. Basically,
you're correct. It was a cost decision which overrode any technical
and customer use considerations. As I said, Linksys didn't know what
their customers were doing with the products. However, I don't think
Linksys was trying to be the absolute cheapest. They had a winning
product, with the highest sales in the industry, and they (almost)
killed it. It's called "pissing in the soup".

Actually you can and do get less bugs along with more features when
development is done properly. "Quality is free."

That's a great slogan which seems to fail all too often. The problem
is not the lack of quality but rather the vendors and customers
perception of quality. If they're different, there's going to be
problem.

Let's try a different approach. One can maximize their successes or
minimize their failures. The approaches to everything from marketing
to product development differ radically between these two attitudes.
Minimizing one's failures are the "zero defect" programs, which
generally fail to produce anything useful. Maximizing one's successes
sometime turns into ignoring all problems and losing products and just
keep selling the winners. I don't consider either extereme to be
useful and a compromise is often necessary. Quality might be free
during the development cycle, but once the product has hit the market,
damage control is NOT free.

Linksys demonstrated this by raising the price on the replacement V4
and WRT54L models, saturating the retail chain with the v5 models, and
following up the mistake with a WRT54GS v6 model, which appears to be
more of the same. The first step to solving a problem is to recognize
the mistake. I don't think Linksys has done this (yet).

Oh? Perhaps the return rate on the V5 mutation is an indication of
its popularity? I don't have exact numbers but I hear it's rather
high.

How high? For what reasons? That's too vague to be terribly persuasive. ;)

Sorry. That was intentionally vague. All I have are some word of
mouth numbers, which I can't leak, and which I'm not even sure are
accurate or current.

When the technology (finally) matures, products generally mature as well,
becoming a dependable commodity. V.34 modems are now a case in point.

How many new quality V.34 modem models have appeared in the last 10
years? When the demand slacked off on V.34 modems, the manufacturers
had time to clean up their mess. Since there were not going to be
any subsequent models, they had a good incentive to fix their
problems.

That's not the case with wireless, where the product lifetime is so
short, that by the time the problems are fixed, the product is dead.
The long delay at Zyxel in fixing known 660HW WPA bugs is one example.
The problem has been known for about a year. There's beta firmware
floating around that apparently hasn't fixed everything. By the time
the firmware is ready for general consumption, the product will be
obsolete.

When the major driving point is lowest price, everything, including
quality, suffers.

Again, "quality is free." It really is. See my prior rants on quality. ;)

You obviously have more experience in software quality than me. My
personal experience is with a marine radio manufactory that considered
the measure of quality to be the return and repair rate. If the
dealers were returning product, it was presumed that there was
something wrong with it. It's my understanding that this is still the
case.

Such a measure of quality resulted in some interesting comedies. We
were under pressure to deliver product so everything that was deemed
non-essential was delayed. That included the service documentation.
About 9 months after initial shipments, we were finally able to
deliver a proper service manual with test points, schematics, and
tuning proceedures. Immediately, the repair and return rate shot up.
What had happened was that the dealers were ignoring problems until
they could get repair docs. Then, they dived in, and being an
unfamiliar product, made a mess. So, they returned it to the factory
for exchange or repair. There was a small faction that wanted to
eliminate the repair manual as it was directly responsible for the
deterioration in "quality".

Anyway, quality may be free, but damage control is not free.

My own not so humble opinion is that they're lots better today, but do still
have a pretty long way to go. I think perhaps you might be frustrated by the
fact that so many of the current issues are (a) longstanding, (b) inexcusable,
and (c) relatively easy to fix. ;)

What price do we put on perfection? I had the same problem with SCO.
The long development of their operating systems resulted in a
substantial number of minor and trivial bugs that never seemed to make
the fix list. They were more irritations than bugs and of course,
there were always more important bugs to fix and features to add.
Eventually, these minor bugs began to accumulate and eventually gave
the product a "shoddy" appearance. It was difficult to do anything
without running into at least one minor bug.

So, I suggested that instead of working on the major bugs, the company
should spend a fixed length of time and concentrate on fixing as many
minor bugs as possible. The logic was that 1000 such minor bugs could
be fixed in the same time frame as one major bug or feature addition.
I convinced almost everyone except those making the decisions, so the
idea was dropped.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
.

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