Re: Wireless @ D.C. IETF

[Stuart Cheshire <cheshire at apple.com>]

>I'll give you a free Wireless Access Point(10BaseT to wireless ethernet 
>bridge) and a PCMCIA Wireless NIC if you can provide a functioning
>driver by 8:00am on Sunday Nov. 6th for one of the following platforms
>
>MacOS (PowerPC, Open Transport 1.0 or higher)
>...

I fear you will have trouble finding anyone to do the Mac version. Apple 
already has IEEE 802.11 (DS) at 11Mb/s, and the price is only $99 for the 
card and $299 for the Ethernet/Wireless/Modem base station. Starting with 
this summer's new Macs, they all have dual antennas built in to the 
plastics, so you get much better signal strength and you don't have 
inconvenient little dongles hanging out the side of the computer.

Anyone with the necessary skills to write your driver would probably be 
able to afford $400 to buy their own hardware.

On a related note, Apple sells about six million machines a year, and the 
$99 wireless option is reported to be very popular. Don't underestimate 
the effect that this will have in establishing a de-facto standard for 
wireless LANs. Once 11Mb/s wireless networking gets established at a $99 
retail price-point, it won't easily be displaced until we have something 
that's a lot faster, or a lot cheaper, or both. 10Mb/s Ethernet was 
around for more than a decade before people finally made the switch to 
100Mb/s.

Stuart Cheshire <cheshire at apple.com>
 * <A HREF="http://ResComp.Stanford.EDU/~cheshire/";>Web Page</A>
 * Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer