[Aironet] Arrrghhh!! No Cisco gear in the WISP market!!

[Brian C. <br...@pa...>]

My quest to find out why I was having range problems using my phalanx of
Aironet 34X gear has just ended, at the Cisco TAC.

The response I just received verifies what I have been being told by a
number of people: Cisco has designed the firmware in their cards in such
a way that both the NICs and the access points are unusable, at least
officially, past one mile out.  The only product that supports
long-range communications is the bridge.

Two separate vendors with great presence in the market had previously
advised me to dump my Cisco gear and replace it with Lucent, which I
will soon begin to speedily do.

I know I'm inviting myself to be roasted to a crisp for this, but those
vendors also told me this, which is consistent with the information I
have in hand from Cisco: "The decision to make the timeout period for
the ACK fixed and not programmable in the WICs and access points was
primarily made to force customers to purchase much higher-margin
equipment.  Competitors, most notably Lucent, have decided not to try to
protect their access equipment in this manner, and you'll find yourself
having no problems going 15 or 20 miles out with a very low cost Lucent
PCMCIA wireless card."

So I am open to offers for the following Cisco equipment, all either new
or in the barest state of use:

Two 342 Access Points
4 PCI342
2 LCM342
2 LCM352
3 PCI352
2 PCM342

If anyone has any information contrary to this about range limitations I
sure would be obliged to hear it before going through the trouble of
dumping this equipment.

If it is in fact true, hopefully this will save someone else from
committing the same error as I have.

Thanks.

B.