ORiNOCO

Chipsets

ORiNOCO was the brand name for a family of wireless networking technology by Proxim Wireless (previously Lucent). These integrated circuits (codenamed Hermes) provide wireless connectivity for 802.11-compliant Wireless LANs.

Variants

Lucent offered several variants of the PC Card, referred to by different color-based monikers:

White/Bronze: WaveLAN IEEE Standard 2 Mbit/s PC Cards with 802.11 support.
Silver: WaveLAN IEEE Turbo 11 Mbit/s PC Cards with 802.11b and 64-bit WEP support.
Gold: WaveLAN IEEE Turbo 11 Mbit/s PC Cards with 802.11b and 128-bit WEP support.

Later models dropped the 'Turbo' moniker due to 802.11b 11 Mbit/s becoming widespread.

Proxim, after taking over Lucent's wireless division, rebranded all their wireless cards to ORiNOCO - even cards not based on Lucent/Agere's Hermes chipset. Proxim still offers ORiNOCO-based cards under the 'Classic' brand.

Rebranded products

The WaveLAN chipsets that power ORiNOCO-branded cards were commonly used to power other wireless networking devices, and are compatible with a number of other access points, routers and wireless cards. The following brand and models utilise the chipset, or are rebrands of an ORiNOCO product:

3Com AirConnect
Apple Airport and Airmac cards (original only, non extreme). Modified to remove the antenna stub.
AVAYA World Card
Cabletron RoamAbout 802.11 DS
Compaq WL100 11 Mbit/s Wireless Adapter
D-Link DWL-650
ELSA AirLancer MC-11
Enterasys RoamAbout^[1]
Ericsson WLAN Card C11
Farallon SkyLINE
Fujitsu RoomWave
HyperLink Wireless PC Card 11Mbit/s
Intel PRO/Wireless 2011
Lucent Technologies Wavelan/IEEE Orinoco
Melco WLI-PCM-L11
Microsoft Wireless Notebook Adapter MN-520
NCR WaveLAN/IEEE Adapter
Proxim LAN PC CARD HARMONY 80211B
Samsung 11Mbit/s WLAN Card
Symbol LA4111 Spectrum24 Wireless LAN PC Card
Toshiba Wireless Lan Mini PCI Card

^[2]

Preferred wireless chipset for wardriving

The ORiNOCO (and their derivatives) is preferred by wardrivers, due to their high sensitivity and the ability to report the level of noise (something that other chips do not report). The pre-Proxim (or 'Classic') ORiNOCO cards have a jack for attaching an external antenna.^[3]

Linux drivers

A Linux Orinoco Driver supports the IEEE 802.11b Hermes/ORiNOCO family of chips. It was included in the Linux kernel since version 2.4.3.^[4]

External links

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Saturday, January 03, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.