dyoung@pobox.com (David Young) writes:
> This is SO off topic, but this begs for a response: 200mW is OVERKILL
> for most applications. 50mW or LESS is sufficient for the majority of
> applications.  Be a responsible user of the spectrum (and save money!) by
> choosing the right power level for your application. Home and office
> networking does NOT usually require 200mW.

The wifi card I'm familiar with (cisco 350) lets you set the xmit
power level on a per packet basis.  If you don't need to xmit with
full power to get the signal to the other side you don't have to.

Now NetBSD could trivially have an xmit power level slot added to the
MAC table and grab that power level value when it grabs the MAC for
the low-level header.  I never bothered to do that here, mainly
because having to *much* signal was never the problem.  My experience
was that even the 100mw cards still needed quite a bit of screwing
around to get a good full-speed connection with.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht 		     http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
(NOTE: The email address above is valid.  Edit it at your own peril.)