On Wednesday of this week the LANPlanner product team will be announcing to current customers with entitled support contracts the availability of a new USB Wlan Adapter driver for collecting site-survey data for a/b/g/n networks with LANPlanner and SiteScanner. It is difficult to find computers with PCMCIA slots anymore, but USB-stick network cards are becomming common so we wanted to get this update to the field as soon as possible. AirMagnet is set to make a similar announcement very soon for their products. Internal Motorola users of LANPlanner and SiteScanner may download the driver from the LANPlanner compass site: http://compass.mot.com/go/lanplanner There is no new functionality over the previous Cardbus driver, so if you are satisfied with your current measurement collection set-up today, then no need to switch to this new driver... Also keep in mind that only particular USB adapters are supported (the list is below in the customer announcement). The planned customer release annoucement is as follows: ------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- MOTOROLA RFDESIGN PRODUCT UPDATE ANNOUNCEMENT -- NEW USB WLAN DRIVER ----------------------------------------------------------------- In this issue: ----------------------------------------------------------------- - Product Update Announcement - Downloading the USB Driver - Current Shipping Versions - Providing Us With Feedback Product Update Announcement ----------------------------------------------------------------- The Motorola RF Design and Management Team is pleased to announce the release of a new USB WLAN measurement driver for collecting 802.11 a/b/g/n measurements in LANPlanner, SiteScanner, and EnterprisePlanner using supported Atheros based USB Wlan Adapters. Our previous software measurement driver only supported Cardbus WLAN cards. The following USB WLAN Adapter cards have been tested and are known to be supported with this new driver: * Netgear WNDA3100 * Ubiquiti SR71-USB Customers with a current Annual Maintenance and Support Agreement (AMA) are eligible to download the new USB driver at no charge. Downloading the USB Driver ----------------------------------------------------------------- The USB driver will soon be made available in a new download of the full product installation. Customers who are currently using the Cardbus driver may continue to do so as the USB driver does not provide additional functionality over the Cardbus driver. If you have an urgent need to obtain the driver for USB based WLAN Adapters, please notify us of your request by filling out the inquiry form here [http://onepointwireless.com/rfdesign/question.php]. Current Shipping Versions ----------------------------------------------------------------- We apologize if you have missed any of our previous product update announcements regarding new product availability. We are currently using a new system to bring you these updates, so if you receive this email then no further action is required on your part. The current shipping versions of the products are as follows: * LANPlanner 11.0.5 * SiteScanner 2.0.3 * EnterprisePlanner 11.0.5 * MeshPlanner 2.7.5 * MeshScanner 2.7.5 Customers with a current annual maintenance and support contract may download the latest shipping version of entitled products here [http://onepointwireless.com/rfdesign/download.php]. The product Quick Start Guides [http://onepointwireless.com/rfdesign/documentation.php] detail what is new in each version. Providing Us With Feedback ----------------------------------------------------------------- As always, thank you for your continued patronage. The product team appreciates your feedback, so please feel free to let us know [http://onepointwireless.com/rfdesign/feedback.php] how we may better serve your needs. Regards, RF Design and Management Team http://onepointwireless.com/rfdesign http://motorola.com/rfdesign
USB Wlan Adapter Driver now available for LANPlanner and SiteScanner// Expert user has replied. |
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This is cool indeed. My laptop now has ExpressCard only, PCMCIA cards just don't fit in, and finding a ExpressCard WLAN adapter seems impossible. Now I have an option The question is when will we be able to provide support for Intel WLAN chips, which are very common in laptops, so we could use built-in ones? We now own AirDefense (who developed these drivers, if I recall correct), so why don't we do it?
Hi Arsen, I can address your questions, but first, let me note that for internal Motorolans with access to compass, you may get the USB driver installer at: http://compass.mot.com/go/lanplanner Let me address the AirDefense question first. The Wireless Valley team is working very closely with the AirDefense team because there is a lot of overlap between the driver work they do and the driver work we have done. In fact, we have aligned our roadmaps to support one common base client driver across our products moving forward. The client side driver work that is currently commercialized by AirDefense and by Wireless Valley have both been based on Atheros chipsets. Re: Intel chipsets. It could be possible to support intel chipsets. We have looked into this in the past. However, there are some major reasons why we have not done so: Supporting two driver platforms requires twice as much effort. Also, not all laptops have an Intel wifi chip inside. Broadcomm and Real-tek are two of the other major competitors in this space and also have notable market share. When choosing to focus on supporting only one platform, Atheros is a good choice because external cards tend to be more flexible for our customers, and a USB a/b/g/n dual band Atheros adapter can be purchased for less than $100. Atheros has good name recognition in this space and provides one of the most flexible development solutions (e.g. they provide full source to their driver). Nearly every competitor in the market with a site-survey application of some sort uses the Atheros chipsets for their RFMonitoring mode scanning. The last time we investigated the Intel platform, it was changing rapidly and source code was not available... we were dependent on Intel to implement the APIs to their driver we required and we were unable to modify the base driver to suit our needs if we wanted to add expanded funtionality above and beyond what they offered by default... also, there would have been more of an effort to negotiate a contract with Intel. It's possible some of this has changed, so please keep your comments coming. If you encounter more customers who have a real need for the internal Intel chipset support, please contact me as I'd be interested in speaking with them to better understand those needs. The last thing I want to mention is, LANPlanner and SiteScanner also support using any NDIS compatible generic WLAN adapter. This is sufficient for performing throughput/data rate tests, or for collecting measurements to optimize a building drawing for LANPlanner. However, the generic NDIS adapaters don't necessarily detect all rogue APs where as RFMonitoring mode with the Atheros chipset will. So, depending on the needs of the surveyor, using the internal Intel chipset may be sufficient for survey puposes and it is supported by our software. Thanks, -KB