802.11b/802.11g Interoperability

[grantc2]

Has anyone ever had a problem with getting various wireless standards to work with each other. For example, If a person walks into a wi-fi zone with a dell integrated 802.11b laptop and trys to connect to a cisco 802.11b AP. Is it possible that they just don't want to talk to each other. To be more specific, if the same standard is being used by both devices, could the seperate vendors play a role in interoperability? Just assume that no encryption / authentication is being used. Sorry this quesiton is so vague

[lwheeler]

As long as they are WECA certified, no. WECA assures and certifies these products are interoperable and everone shoots for being WECA certified.
Larry

[keenanj]

most hotspots support the base 802.11b standard with no wep so the maximum number of devices are supported at the longest range. The compatibility problems can arise from vendors adding extensions to the standard that do not interoperate. For example the 802.11 standard only specifies 64bit wep. There is no guarantee that other vendors 128bit wep will interoperate. However in practice most devices do talk to eachother just fine.