Wireless

If you are not offered Vista SP1 from Windows Update, and you are using an Intel WiFi card (typically with model numbers of 4965AGN/4965AG or 3945ABG/3945BG/3965ABG/3965BG), please grab this full generic "reference" driver package from Intel to fix your wireless issues, here. 99.99% of the time, these drivers will work on any laptop or desktop with these chipsets.

Originally spotted here.

In general, if you are running a version of the wireless drivers with a revision date older than 2008, you should install this driver package ASAP. Although it doesn't specifically mention it in the release notes, many little quirks and problems have been resolved, including the Vista SP1 "blocking" issue.

Just to make sure Vista SP1 doesn't get a bad reputation due to this, the "block" was put in place on purpose due to a bug in the wireless driver package, not the OS.

Apparently, this started on March 2nd, 2008. Anytime you go over 5GB in a month, you get slapped with $0.49 per MB charges.

I signed up a few years ago when they were first rolling out EVDO nationwide. My account still shows "Unlimited", although based on the fact that they were sued in the past on their definition of "Unlimited", I will be watching my bill closely the next few months.

I predict a mass exodus away from Verizon's EVDO plans if they continue to do this. Why? 5GB a month is extremely easy to go over in a month's time.

Mind you, we're not playing World of Warcraft or downloading BitTorrent content. This is strictly web content, e-mail, and an occasional RDP session which I must do for work from time to time. Even so, when I do "work stuff", I typically try to use my work phone for the data usage.

Sprint has been aggressively rolling out EVDO in Ottawa county due to the broadband agreement they reached with the county and AllTel is all around us otherwise. Even though I enjoy EVDO Rev. A speeds, I will drop Verizon like a bad habit if they try to retroactively apply these new charges to our account. It isn't what we signed up for, and it is not in our contract.

Sprint and AllTel have good roaming agreements for EVDO and they don't have these excessive charges.

If Verizon Wireless was the only provider in the area, we'd be "stuck with them", much like our cable situation. We have Charter cable available in our neighborhood but it is analog only. I am curious if the 2009 digital TV cut over will affect the "analog only" situation, but I suspect they are not going to upgrade us anytime soon. There is plenty of interest in our neighborhood for cable modems but that never seems to change their plans.

I'm not necessarily excited that Verizon won most the VHF spectrum if they are going to do business like this.

I would love to have FIOS, but I suspect that will not happen anytime soon either, due to the fact that we don't have DSL available out here.

Ultimately, Verizon is punishing customers that have no other choice in Internet broadband. Hopefully, the free market will show them that "The Network" is easily replaceable, and other providers will move into Verizon dominated territories. It seems to be happening, little by little.

Not too long ago, our house was "stuck" with, at best, 1xRTT speeds on our cell phones for data connectivity. Verizon finally upgraded the tower near our house last fall and we've been living in EVDO Rev A heaven ever since. Now, it looks like Sprint is going to be upgrading their towers in our area too, and blanketing the county with more EVDO goodness.

You can read more about it here.

They are not kidding when they say that a majority of the county previously had NO broadband options. No cable modems. No DSL. No wireless vendors (WiMax / etc).

I'm always nervous using the Verizon EVDO service because of their vague terms-of-service that can kill your connection/subscription if they decide you are using too much bandwidth. Thankfully, Sprint doesn't really care how much bandwidth you use as long as you are paying them.

I am hoping they roll out EVDO Rev A like Verizon has. The upload speeds are much better than standard EVDO Rev 0. On most days, I get nearly 150KiB/sec on our EVDO Rev A connection. It also helps that I have a crazy external antenna connected to my EVDO modem and router (the Thinkpad 240 that refuses to die).

Never heard of Twitter? I'm not sure of the best way to describe it other than semi-instant messaging on your mobile phone. It is a handy way to blast out your 'status' or 'what you are up to' to a group of people with a simple text message.

I am sure their website explains it better, but anyway, there is now an Outlook plug-in so that you can Twitter from within Outlook. It is called OutTwit.

Pretty neat. I just wish I knew more people that used Twitter.

I don't remember where I found it but this is a great site for finding cell phone towers near your home or business. Punch in an address and it shows a Google map of results. I have no idea who runs it but it is a cool site.

For example, I didn't know there were this many towers around us:

After 3 years of suffering with 1xRTT for a home internet connection, EVDO Rev A finally went live on our local cell tower. For the past few months, our phones had been flipping back and forth between EVDO and 1xRTT but could never sustain a connection on the faster network.

That changed sometime in the past few weeks and thankfully, I was able to run down and grab an EVDO Rev A card to replace my aging and dying Motorola V265 which had faithfully pushed packets since 2004, 24x7x365.




I had been looking into Wilson repeaters and power boosters to get the distant EVDO signal but now it looks like I don't need to go through that mess. The speed difference between EVDO Rev A and 1xRTT is amazing.

I did connect an external antenna up to the Novatel U720 and it boosted my reception quite a bit. The Thinkpad 240 that I use as a router only has one USB port, so I used a powered USB hub to plug both cables from the USB modem in. The modem can operate off of just one USB port but I need all the signal fidelity I can get, so I am using the booster for 1 amp of powered goodness.

3 years of waiting for better than ISDN speeds at our house is finally over!

I was unsure where exactly to put this, category-wise, but I was always curious what exactly was added to Streets and Trips 2008, without marketing-speak, which I tend to dismiss over "real user" reviews.

Well, here is a good real user review and it looks to be a pretty good upgrade overall.
It is nice to see the FM receiver as an option for gas price updates and traffic information.

I admit I use this program more often than I really need to sometimes. I don't have the 2008 version yet but I plan to pick it up shortly. It is a lot of fun to use on an airplane to see exactly where you are while flying. Thankfully, it doesn't freak out when the MPH goes above 100. It does freak out the flight attendants sometimes when they see a glowing blue object in the airplane window.

5 issues relating to wireless authentication are fixed with this hotfix.

1. IEEE 802.1X authentication that is based on Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) switching may fail.

2. In a wireless profile, the information about the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) method that is selected in a user interface may be incorrect.

3. A wireless profile that an independent hardware vendor (IHV) provides may be corrupted after you use the wireless profile user interface to edit the profile. When this problem occurs, you may receive an error message that Windows Explorer has crashed.

4. Every time that you roam to a different wireless access point, you are prompted to provide a user credential. This problem occurs even if you have saved the user credential.

5. You registered a Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol (PEAP) method that the IHV provided. When you try to authenticate against an Internet Authentication Service (IAS) server, the server may reject the authentication, and the IAS server may send an error message that the authentication has failed. The Onex.dll file crashes when this problem occurs.

I'm not a big fan of this. The strangest part of it all is that people recently went from having an AT+T branded cell phone on a Cingular network service, and now in the upcoming weeks, they will have a Cingular brnaded cell phone on an AT+T network service.

Someone on the SA forums summed it up best by saying, "Remember that part in Terminator 2 when the T-1000 was frozen and smashed apart, only to reform a few minutes later? Yeah, that pretty much describes the fall and rebirth of Ma Bell."

That is how I feel about it too. Of course, if this somehow means that FiOS will reach my house, my opinion will change but I doubt that will happen any time soon.

Good news for people that work for Grand Rapids, the city, and for the residents. WiMax has a much longer range than WiFi, so I'm curious just how far the reach of the signal will go. You can read about it more here. Clearwire LLC seems to be providing the service.

I'm hoping this wasn't a fluke because I thought the rollouts were complete but a few times tonight, my Q has switched into EVDO mode. As soon as I called my wife over to see, it had switched back to 1xRTT.

It is like they are teasing us with high speed, but I'm hoping it switches to EVDO for good, soon. It'll save on battery life on the Q and it will also make our "series of tubes" to the internet a little bit wider.

Another powertoy collection that will be going on my Q:

Network Analyzer for Windows Mobile runs network utilities, for example ping and ipconfig, on a Windows Mobile powered device. Network Analyzer for Windows Mobile facilitates the troubleshooting of network connectivity issues. You can extend the harness. You can add user-defined tests (DLLs) to the list of tests to be executed. An xml input file defines the list of tests to execute. You can use Network Analyzer to send information about network traffic to a .cap file. You can then view the .cap file with the Network Monitor tool or the Ethereal tool.

Grab it here.

My wife had a doctor's appointment this morning and her Motorola E815 switched into EVDO mode. The next time she goes into Grand Rapids, she is going to try to figure out which tower is the cutoff point for EVDO if it is still active.

There is a Verizon tower near our house and I am really hoping a truck stops by and puts some new panels and electronics on it this month. If by chance anyone at Verizon reads this, you will have a couple new data plans for sure out of that upgrade alone. I know our population density isn't the greatest, but we are by a lake that has some very upscale homes on it that lack any type of broadband access.

We are in the no mans land of being just west of Kent county, just east of Muskegon county, and right in the little "spike" of Ottawa county. Lots of people on Crockery Lake are wanting broadband access. We don't have DSL available. We don't have wireless ISPs available even though we are in Ottawa county which is supposed to be getting wireless internet county wide. We have analog cable through Charter that is just on the border of cable modem access to the east. Anyone I talk to at Charter has no idea when our neighborhood is going to be rebuilt.

I hate to admit but having an IT job in this region isn't much fun when you have to RDP into servers from home and you can watch the screen repaint with 8-bit color depth on 1xRTT. If I am lucky, I can connect into a Citrix box that has 16-color support enabled. Heck, I'd be fine with monochrome support as long as I could get my work done.

So, if any type of broadband wheeler-dealer sees this, you could make a killing in this region. If I had the capital and balls to put a T1 line into my house and run a WISP, I would, but I don't have the funds or the balls to do it.

Heck, I own 2.5 acres of land where my current house is - I'd be willing to rent my land and put up a tower if it brought EVDO to the area. I'd actually be more inclined to put up a WiMax tower but I'm still uncertain how much penetration they are going to get in the market.

I've also heard that Alltel is testing out EVDO 850 in the area on the towers they gained from the AT+T Wireless deal. They are converting the old GSM towers over to CDMA/EVDO. Of course, what I hear and what is really going on could be two different things. All I know is that Alltel has a big presence in northern Kent county and elsewhere.

People with a single-line calling plan, or a Family SharePlan, with monthly access bills of $79.99 or more are qualified to join this program. You also have to have 3 months of uninterrupted service, but anyone that has been a customer of theirs for an extended period of time should already be at that point.

Right now you end up getting:

1. A new primary phone every one year instead of new every two years. This is the most attractive benefit to me.

2. Free address book transfers. This isn't a selling point to me because I typically backup and my address books from my computer, but I'm not a typical cellular user.

3. 25% off accessories and free shipping from the online store. I typically get my accessories off
eBay so this isn't a selling point for me but it could be for others.

You can apply and get to the special program page by going here.

I'm still unsure which category I should place these entries in, and I really need to flesh out the Serendipity default client to allow you to select multiple categories at once within the editor. Ideally I want to find a nice XML-RPC client application to do all the dirty work but I might have to end up whipping out Visual Studio again and writing something just for me, and potentially others, eventually.

Anyway, I've got the new drivers installed and on a whim, decided to check out the client applications included again. I don't think a wireless driver should require as many system services as these drivers seem to need. Maybe I'm stuck in the old age of 'the less context switches, the better', but it seems like a bit of overkill/sloppy to require so many add-on services.

Mind you, I have the same complaint about Symantec's antivirus services and also even some of the built in Windows services. I still don't believe 'svchost.exe' is a good idea overall because of how difficult it can be to track down which thread or service running under svchost.exe is causing the problem. Although, even mentioning svchost.exe contradicts some of what I have said up above.

On a good note, the memory issues seem to be gone but the drivers still seem to slow down my machine overall if I don't use the XP native wireless support. I wonder if the group of 10,000 Intel employees that are getting the axe soon, include the wireless driver division.

They are probably the same team that moved the configuration tabs for the wired drivers into the driver pane and made them essentially terminal services incompatible due to the way they expose their settings. They seem to be using some type of IE widget that does not launch properly in a RDP session and also throw up XP SP2 / W2K3 SP1 'information bar' security warnings within the driver tabs. I am guessing it was forced upon them due to a change in WHQL requirements, but I've seen other drivers handle it just fine, like NVidia's control panel.

At least they seem to be SMP safe/hyperthreading safe, unlike early Soundblaster Live! drivers. One of my favorite things about hyperthreading and dual core CPUs becoming popular is that it finally exposed a lot of race conditions and locking problems that had always existed in some drivers. Most companies didn't put a priority on bugs that only affected multi-CPU setups. My ASUS P2B-D and Abit BP6 motherboards would act a lot better today than in the past because of this. I will admit the multiple CPU support in the BP6 was a dirty hack, but it was a great, cheap, platform if you were lucky enough to get a good Abit BP6. Sure, you would still end up with spurious APIC errors from time to time due to the way the board was laid out, but overall it was a solid motherboard under Windows and especially Linux. The Highpoint UDMA-66 kludge chipset was a nightmare to deal with but if you snipped off the chip off the board, you ended up with a much better machine and one less IRQ "line" shared.

I still have two Abit BP6 motherboards in storage somewhere. One motherboard fried due to the now well known 'leaky caps' problem, and as far as I know, the other motherboard is still in working condition and fully populated. I need to dig that out someday and revisit the glory days of Abit motherboards. I'm still amazed how many Celeron 300a chips would easily reach 450 to 500mhz with stock cooling. Quite a few Celeron 366 chips would easily reach 550mhz and above if you were lucky. It looks like history is repeating itself with the new Intel Conroe chips.

Wow, I never knew this entry would morph into a trip down (SDRAM) memory lane, but it did by accident.