802.11 wireless

Can any body give me a quick and dirty explanition of 802.11 net works . What is the difference between 802.11b and g ?
I just recently had to put one in and had to fake it all the way , it works and every thing but i don't know crap about one .

Webopedia sez...
p.s., there's also a link to some technical info (the original IEEE white paper, I believe) on there

The very short answer is about 43mb/s in theory.
In almost all situations, the answer is bugger all.

Some/Most 802.11b hardware and software only allows WEP as security. 802.11g comes with WPA which is considered more secure.

In some cases, the lack of WPA upgrades for existing 802.11b products is a business decision, in others it is technical. So if you want to be sure about better security, the best way is to start at 802.11g.

Note that many Palm devices still are shipping with only 802.11b.

I have a Linksys external wireless NIC that does B and G. My connections are generally:

2 MB: 50% of the time,
5.5 MB: 30% of the time,
11 MB: 20% of the time.

It depends on the router and the walls.

cool info thanks . this was on a job where a customer wanted to extend out scale equipment WAY farther than is possible normaly (1000ft from scale to scale indicator ). I have used sperad spectrum modems to do this befor , but Mangement was trying to throw me i think and got this 802.11b set up( but HA i fool them and made it work) . We ended up putting an external anttena on the roof , we also NEED to put an external anttena at the scale because the signal is WEAK !!!! A mover already messed things up by moveing the hub out of the window , the other end lost signal , and no scale !!
Oh we were origanly extending out serial lines , but now they want eathernet . Should be fun figuering it out !!!!!!!!

1000 feet is easy for an 802.11 link with line of sight and directional antennas. Provided you can keep people from moving the things, of course.

Some guys at Defcon in Nevada managed a 37 mile unamplified link, could have gone longer but they ran out of road. Granted they were using 9.5" dish antennas...

BTW, 802.11 IS spread spectreum (DSS for b, OFDM for g and a)