Monday, July 31, 2006

The limited abilities of the Prism chipset

I've come to the conclusion that the Intersil Prism chipset is only good for the purposes it was originally manufactured for. That is a simple wireless client and maybe a very basic wireless access point. Use it for anything else and it 'might' work but generally it won't.

But even then it has its issues as I have discovered. When used within a Mikrotik RouterOS system it has issues with connecting to Access Points with WEP enabled. For example I attempted to connect to a Netgear DSL modem/router/AP and it would work fine for about 10min and then just stop responding even tho it is still associated. I managed to overcome this issue by using a seperate Senao Access Point, even then it didn't work 100% as it didn't want to talk to its wireless client neighbours, only the AP and the router behind it.

For now on I will be using CM9's and SR5/9 miniPCI cards, which are all Atheros based.

I wish there were more wireless chipset vendors that catered for this particular market - but I guess we can't have everything and consolidation was bound to occur.

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