Issues with Intel's 2200B/G internal Wireless Card...

[d.beaver]

I know this has been kicked around on this forum before, but I am trying to look deeper into the issue with the 2200B/G card.

I work as a wireless consultant for a company which performs many wireless installations, both Aironet and Airespace in Hospital and Medical environments. In the past, we ran into issues where we had deployed Aironet 1231G radios throughout a hospital and the client had IBM and Fujitsu Laptops with the built in Intel 2200B/G cards and their mission critical applications would not work properly. After troubleshooting and reading of others identical issues, we recommended to the customer to use the Cisco A/B/G card which solved their problems.

Well I am at another hospital installing the Airespace solution and wondered if anyone has experienced issues between the Airespace and the Intel 2200B/G? The only other option the client has when ordering the laptops is the IBM built in card and I am recommending that.

I just wanted to get some thoughts from others in the same boat.

Thanks.

[slaterc]

Three things about this card which I have experienced:

1. WEP with MIC and KEY-HASH is not supported. The card associates with the AP but communication is all one-way, i.e. card to AP. The card appears to see nothing coming from the AP. I assume this is because it doesn't recognise packets with MIC and key-hash.

2. It does however support WPA and WPA2 if your client software allows these.

3. On my laptop, I get at least one blue screen a day (Windows 2000)using this card, despite having the latest driver from Intel.

[d.beaver]

Thanks for the reply.

We have experienced random connection drops (between the 2200BG card and the AP) with mission critical applications such as Medhost.

Medhost is a multicast application used mainly in Emergency Rooms and is used to report patient status, nurse and doctor visit times, drug intervals, etc. The Nurse Supervisor can monitor the status of a patient and keep the doctors up to date.

What we witnessed at our last hospital facility were drops that occurred about every 4 to 5 minutes with the 2200BG. We took a laptop with the 2200BG card, a laptop with a Cisco ABG card, and a laptop with an HP card and performed a constant ping to the ACS server across the AP.

Over the course of time described above, we found the 2200BG card would start to reply at 2ms, then 20ms, then 300ms, then 1500ms, then drop for three cycles. The connection would re-establish itself, but the application would have to be restarted. The Cisco and HP cards worked without flaw.

We could only equate this to issues with the physical card. We had the client order computers with other types of cards, and everything works great for them.

Intel says it is the access point, however we see things differently. Anymore thoughts?