Rangelan2

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Rangelan2 was a broad family of wireless devices developed by Proxim Inc. (and is a trademark of that company). It also refers to the 'Rangelan2 wireless communications protocol used by these devices, but the protocol was officially renamed OpenAir. This protocol was in use prior to the adoption of the 802.11b standard, and was in competition with it, and uses approximately the same portion of the radio spectrum. When 802.11b was adopted as a standard, the Rangelan2 market began to contract.

[edit] Performance

Rangelan2 devices have typical bandwidths of about 2 Mbit/s, and in indoor range of about 150 ft (46 m), similar to 802.11b. Rangelan2 uses spread-spectrum radio transmission technology. These devices can interoperate with 802.11b and can still be used today. Support for Rangelan2 products was aimed primarily at the Windows market, but drivers for some rangelan2 products (such as PCMCIA cards) for Mac OS 9 was developed although it did not get wide distribution. Linux drivers were also developed for many Rangelan2 devices.

Typical RangeLAN2 figures:

Radio Data Rate: 1.6 Mbit/s per channel, 800 kbit/s fallback rate
Channels: Supports 15 independent, non-interfering "virtual channels"
Official Indoor Range: Up to 500 feet (~150 m) radius (not necessarily reached in practice)
Official Outdoor range: 1,000+ feet (300+ m) radius

[edit] Current status

Perhaps a result of various corporate consolidations, Proxim Inc. no longer seems to make much information on this protocol or these devices available. While many references to this technology are available on the internet, it is now difficult to find sources that are assured to persist.

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Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2007)

External link: http://www.komacke.com/distribution.html (description of rangelan2 support for linux, but drivers not available)

http://www.arcelect.com/RF_wireless_LAN_frequency_hopping_2.4GHz.htm