[Cu-wireless] 2wire's irresponsible new product

[David Young]

More power means ... less bandwidth for everybody! These 400mW home APs
could be bad news.

Dave

----- Forwarded message from John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> -----

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To: <wireless at lists.bawug.org>
From: John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com>
Subject: [BAWUG] 2Wire and SBC interference?
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 16:08:05 -0600


I'm a mini-WISP in a small town in the Midwest.
I was tracking down some interference on a Cisco AP-352
today.  It's incapacitated by deauthentication messages:
the log shows "2004/01/19 09:37:10 (Info): Deauthentication 
from 00:d0:9e:f8:8f:b1, reason "Not Associated", many 
per second.  That mystery MAC isn't any of mine.  

The wired side is flooded with LLC packets from the AP with 
a destination of 01:40:96:ff:ff:00.  The AP is dropping 
30% of ping packets sent to it.

So I did a little wardriving to try to find the mystery MAC.
Lookup says it's a 2Wire device.  Sure enough, I find not
one but four APs in the neighborhood "2WIRE268" "2WIRE837" 
"2WIRE870" "2WIRE877", all on default channel 6, where
none were a few months ago.

Well, here's why they're showing up:
http://www.2wire.com/pr/pr12022003.html

SBC recently rolled out DSL in my town.  They offered a 
rebate or a wireless AP / firewall.  That press release above
says these home APs are up to 400 mW each, and that one
of 2Wire's exclusive distributors is SBC.  

It's their right to sell DSL, of course, but now they're
also polluting the 2.4 Ghz spectrum.  These home APs were
lighting up the neighborhood with more power than any
of the WISPs in town.

I'm still trying to figure out what to reset on the AP-352
to turn off this LLC problem.  I tried adding that MAC to
the denied list, but it only made it worse as the AP slowed
down even more, it seemed.

- John

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----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933