[$tinkle]

however, it does not prevent standard wireless connectivity. it only fails to establish & maintain the corporate vpn connection. incoming calls sever the connection as well.

i have an actiontec router, provided by qwest.
i'm using a b/g embedded card on my hp nc6000.

is it a 5.8 issue? a payload issue?

 

[binary visions]

At a guess, you're not getting very good standard wireless connectivity with the phone on, and that it's iffy enough to cause a sufficient number of dropped packets to kill the connection. Most normal activity doesn't notice many dropped packets - a retransmit is requested, you get the new packets, and everyone's happy. A VPN connection can die if it's not maintaining the connection, though.

The problem is that most 5.8ghz phones actually use the 2.4ghz (WiFi) spectrum as well as 5.8... I think one is used to transmit and one is used to receive.

Have you tried changing the channel on your wireless router?

 

[$tinkle]

ok, my router transmits on channel 9 (default), but my wireless was configured to channel 6 (default configuration), which was all well & good, until a call was initiated.

i changed my router to ch 6 & it appears to be all good. btw, i'm leaving my other laptop & pc on ch 9 & they don't appear to have any complaint. do you think this may not be the best idea for performance? that is, will it spend unnecessary time "faulting" on each packet, then scanning for the right channel? or does it figure it out on the first fault & keep the right channel for the duration of the session?

either way, problem solved; thanks for the direction.

 

[binary visions]

They'll pick up the proper channel to transmit on at session initiation. Setting the wireless channel on the PC/laptop does exactly nothing since it's access point that determines what channel to broadcast on. When you change the wireless channel on the computer it only changes what channel an ad-hoc network (peer-to-peer) would establish itself on.

 

[$tinkle]

since you brought it up, what's a reasonable use for ad-hoc @ home? WoWing w/ fellow paste-eaters?

 

[binary visions]

Well, it's useful if you want any kind of home network without buying a switch or a router. All the computers will pass data to any node they are attached to (sort of like a disorganized token ring), so you can actually form a fairly large meshed network under the right circumstances. Local LAN games, transfer of data from computer to computer... I'd imagine you can share out an internet connection, thus gaining a wireless internet connection without a wireless router, though I haven't tried that.

On a broader scale, it has the potential to be a really cool tool for widespread networking without a lot of infrastructure. I believe the One Laptop Per Child initiative is trying to use it to form a mesh network in poor areas where implementing a lot of wireless hardware is impractical.