WaveLAN was a brand name for a family of

wireless network A wireless network is a computer network that uses wireless data connections between network nodes. Wireless networking is a method by which homes, telecommunications networks and business installations avoid the costly process of introducing ...

ing technology sold by NCR,

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...

Lucent Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies business u ...

Technologies, and Agere Systems as well as being sold by other companies under OEM agreements. The WaveLAN name debuted on the market in 1990 and was in use until 2000, when Agere Systems renamed their products to

ORiNOCO The Orinoco () is one of the longest rivers in South America at . Its drainage basin, sometimes known as the Orinoquia, covers , with 76.3 percent of it in Venezuela and the remainder in Colombia. It is the fourth largest river in the wor ...

. WaveLAN laid the important foundation for the formation of IEEE 802.11 working group and the resultant creation of Wi-Fi. WaveLAN has been used on two different families of wireless technology: * Pre- IEEE 802.11 WaveLAN, also called ''Classic WaveLAN'' * IEEE 802.11-compliant WaveLAN, also known as ''WaveLAN IEEE'' and ''ORiNOCO''

History

WaveLAN was originally designed by NCR Systems Engineering, later renamed into WCND (Wireless Communication and Networking Division) at

Nieuwegein Nieuwegein () is a municipality and city in the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is bordered on the north by the city of Utrecht, the provincial capital. It is separated from Vianen to the south by the river Lek and borders on IJsselstein in the ...

, in the province Utrecht in the Netherlands, a subsidiary of

NCR Corporation NCR Corporation, previously known as National Cash Register, is an American software, consulting and technology company providing several professional services and electronic products. It manufactures self-service kiosks, point-of-sale termin ...

, in 1986–7, and introduced to the market in 1990 as a wireless alternative to

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

and

Token Ring Token Ring network IBM hermaphroditic connector with locking clip. Screen contacts are prominently visible, gold-plated signal contacts less so. Token Ring is a computer networking technology used to build local area networks. It was introduc ...

. The next year NCR contributed the WaveLAN design to the IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee. This led to the founding of the 802.11 Wireless LAN Working Committee which produced the original IEEE 802.11 standard, which eventually became the basis of the certification mark

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio waves ...

. When NCR was acquired by

in 1991, becoming the AT&T GIS (Global Information Solutions) business unit, the product name was retained, as happened two years later when the product was transferred to the AT&T GBCS (Global Business Communications Systems) business unit, and again when AT&T spun off their GBCS business unit as

in 1995. The technology was also sold as WaveLAN under an OEM agreement by

Epson Seiko Epson Corporation, or simply known as Epson, is a Japanese multinational electronics company and one of the world's largest manufacturers of computer printers and information- and imaging-related equipment. Headquartered in Suwa, Nagano ...

Hitachi () is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group (''Hitachi Gurūpu'') and had formed part of the Nissan ''zaibatsu'' and later DKB Group and Fuyo G ...

, and

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

, and as the RoamAbout DS by DEC. It competed directly with Aironet's non-802.11

ARLAN Arlan may refer to: * Arlan, Krasnokamsky District, Republic of Bashkortostan * Aironet ARLAN, a family of wireless networking technologies * Mount Arlan, a mountain in Turkmenistan * Arlan Kokshetau, a Kazakhstani hockey club *Arlan's, an American ...

lineup, which offered similar speeds, frequency ranges and hardware. Several companies also marketed wireless bridges and routers based on the WaveLAN

ISA Isa or ISA may refer to: Places * Isa, Amur Oblast, Russia * Isa, Kagoshima, Japan * Isa, Nigeria * Isa District, Kagoshima, former district in Japan * Isa Town, middle class town located in Bahrain * Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia * Mount ...

and

PC card In computing, PC Card is a configuration for computer parallel communication peripheral interface, designed for laptop computers. Originally introduced as PCMCIA, the PC Card standard as well as its successors like CardBus were defined and devel ...

s, like the C-Spec OverLAN, KarlNet KarlBridge, Persoft Intersect Remote Bridge, and Solectek AIRLAN/Bridge Plus. Lucent's WavePoint II access point could accommodate both the classic WaveLAN PC cards as well as the WaveLAN IEEE cards. Also, there were a number of compatible third-party products available to address niche markets such as: Digital Ocean's Grouper, Manta, and Starfish offerings for the

Apple Newton The Newton is a series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) developed and marketed by Apple Computer, Inc. An early device in the PDA category (the Newton originated the term), it was the first to feature handwriting recognition. Apple started ...

and Macintosh; Solectek's 915 MHz WaveLAN parallel port adapter; Microplex's M204 WaveLAN-compatible wireless print server; NEC's Japanese-market only C&C-Net 2.4 GHz adapter for the NEC-bus; Toshiba's Japanese-market only WaveCOM 2.4 GHz adapter for the Toshiba-Bus; and

Teklogix Teklogix International Inc., or Teklogix, was a tech company founded in 1967 by engineers working at Ferranti-Packard. The company focused on mini computer applications. It designed and built complete systems based upon DEC's PDP-8 computer, DEC's ...

's WaveLAN-compatible Pen-based and Notebook terminals. During this time frame, networking professionals also realized that since

NetWare NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol. The original NetWare product in ...

3.x and 4.x supported the WaveLAN cards and came with a Multi Protocol Router module that supported the IP/ IPX

RIP Rest in peace (RIP), a phrase from the Latin (), is sometimes used in traditional Christian services and prayers, such as in the Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Methodist denominations, to wish the soul of a decedent eternal rest and peace. ...

and

OSPF Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a routing protocol for Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It uses a link state routing (LSR) algorithm and falls into the group of interior gateway protocols (IGPs), operating within a single autonomous syst ...

routing protocols, one could construct a wireless

routed Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched telephone netwo ...

network using NetWare servers and WaveLAN cards for a fraction of the cost of building a wireless bridged network using WaveLAN access points. Many NetWare classes and textbooks of the time included a NetWare OS CD with a 2-person license, so potentially the only cost incurred came from hardware. When the

802.11 IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer com ...

protocol was ratified, Lucent began producing chipsets and PC-cards to support this new standard under the name of WaveLAN IEEE. WaveLAN was among the first products certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, originally called the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Association (WECA). Shortly thereafter, Lucent spun off its semiconductor division that also produced the WaveLAN chipsets as

Agere Systems Agere Systems, Inc. was an integrated circuit components company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Spun out of Lucent Technologies in 2002, Agere was merged into LSI Corporation in 2007. LSI was in turn acquired by Avago Technologies in 2014. In ...

. On June 17, 2002 Proxim acquired the IEEE 802.11 LAN equipment business including the trademark ORiNOCO from Agere Systems. Proxim later renamed its entire 802.11 wireless networking lineup to ORiNOCO, including products based on

Atheros Qualcomm Atheros is a developer of semiconductor Integrated circuit, chips for Computer network, network communications, particularly wireless chipsets. Founded under the name T-Span Systems in 1998 by experts in signal processing and VLSI desig ...

chipsets.

Specifications

Classic WaveLAN operates in the 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz ISM bands. Being a proprietary pre-802.11 protocol, it is completely incompatible with the 802.11 standard. Soon after the publication of the IEEE 802.11 standard on November 18, 1997, WaveLAN IEEE was placed on the market.

Hardware

The pre-802.11 standard WaveLAN cards were based on the Intel 82586 Ethernet PHY controller, which was a commonly used controller in its time and was found in many ISA and MCA Ethernet cards, such as the

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

EtherExpress 16 and the

3COM 3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe e ...

3C523. The WaveLAN IEEE ISA, MCA and PCMCIA cards used Medium Access Controller (MAC), HERMES, designed specifically for 802.11 protocol support. The radio modem section was hidden from the OS, thus making the WaveLAN card appear to be a typical Ethernet card, with the radio-specific features taken care of behind the scenes. While the 900 MHz models and the early 2.4 GHz models operated on one fixed frequency, the later 2.4 GHz cards as well as some 2.4 GHz WavePoint access points had the hardware capacity to operate over ten channels, ranging from 2.412 GHz to 2.484 GHz, with the channels available being determined by the

region In geography, regions, otherwise referred to as zones, lands or territories, are areas that are broadly divided by physical characteristics ( physical geography), human impact characteristics ( human geography), and the interaction of humanity an ...

-specific firmware.

Security

For security, WaveLAN used a 16-bit NWID (NetWork ID) field, which yielded 65,536 potential combinations; the radio portion of the device could receive radio traffic tagged with another NWID, but the controller would discard the traffic.

DES Des is a masculine given name, mostly a short form (hypocorism) of Desmond. People named Des include: People * Des Buckingham, English football manager * Des Corcoran, (1928–2004), Australian politician * Des Dillon (disambiguation), sever ...

encryption (56-bit) was an option in some of the ISA and MCA cards and all of the WavePoint access points. The full-length ISA and MCA cards had a socket for an encryption chip, the half-length 915 MHz ISA cards had solder pads for a socket which was never added, and the 2.4 GHz half-length ISA cards had the chip soldered directly to the board. For the IEEE 802.11 standard the goal was to provide data confidentiality comparable to that of a traditional wired network, using 64- and 128-bit data encryption technology. This first implementation was called “Wired Equivalent Privacy” (WEP). There are shortcomings in WaveLAN & initial 802.11 compatible devices security strategy: * The initial IEEE 802.11 security WEP implementation, was shown to be vulnerable to attack. This was addressed by the 802.11i Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) that replaced WEP in the standard.

Official specifications

Support

Officially released drivers

* Windows 3.11, 95, and NT 3.5/4.0 ** Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and 98 supported the ISA and MCA cards natively but did not provide any configuration or link diagnostics utilities. **Windows NT 3.51 did not natively support the WaveLAN cards, but additional drivers from Microsoft's Windows NT Driver Library were available. *

OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 r ...

NDIS and NetWare Requester * LAN Manager/IBM LAN Server *Artisoft

LANtastic LANtastic is a peer-to-peer local area network (LAN) operating system for DOS and Microsoft Windows (and formerly OS/2). The ''New York Times'' described the network, which permits machines to function both as servers and as workstations, as ...

* PC-TCP for DOS * NetWare Lite, NetWare 2, 3, and 4. Netware 4.11 through 5.x supported the ISA and MCA cards natively but did not provide any configuration or link diagnostics utilities. *

ODI ODI may refer to: * Object Design, Incorporated, a defunct database software company * One Day International, cricket match * Open Data Institute, a UK not-for-profit company promoting open data * Open Data-Link Interface, an implementation of ...

/VLM NetWare client for

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

. The DOS drivers came with configuration and link diagnostics utilities. *

SCO UNIX Xinuos OpenServer, previously SCO UNIX and SCO Open Desktop (SCO ODT), is a closed source computer operating system developed by Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), later acquired by SCO Group, and now owned by Xinuos. Early versions of OpenServer were ...

version 1.00.00.00 * UnixWare version 1.1 *NCR's documentation stated that drivers for Banyan Vines 5.05 were available on Banyan's BBS, but it is unclear if they ever materialized

Volunteer-developed drivers

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

has included support for ISA Classic WaveLAN cards since the 2.0.37 kernel, while full support for the PC card Classic WaveLAN cards came later. Status of support for MCA Classic Wavelan cards is unknown.

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

version 2.2.1-up and the Mach4 kernel have had native support for the ISA Classic WaveLAN cards for several years.

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project e ...

and

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is ava ...

do not natively support any of the Classic WaveLAN cards. Several open-source projects, such as NdisWrapper and Project Evil, currently exist that allow the use of NDIS drivers via a " wrapper". This allows non-Windows OS' to utilize the near-universal nature of drivers written for the Windows platform to the benefit of other operating systems, such as Linux, FreeBSD, and

ZETA Zeta (, ; uppercase Ζ, lowercase ζ; grc, ζῆτα, el, ζήτα, label= Demotic Greek, classical or ''zē̂ta''; ''zíta'') is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 7. It was derived f ...

Examples

Classic WaveLAN technology was available for the MCA, ISA/EISA, and PCMCIA interfaces:

915 MHz

* Full-length

card **

F connector The F connector (also F-type connector) is a coaxial RF connector commonly used for "over the air" terrestrial television, cable television and universally for satellite television and cable modems, usually with RG-6/U cable or with RG-59/U ...

** RG-59/U antenna cable ** NCR 008-0126998 HOLI (HOst Lan Interface) chip **NCR 008-0126999

Icarus In Greek mythology, Icarus (; grc, Ἴκαρος, Íkaros, ) was the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth of Crete. After Theseus, king of Athens and enemy of Minos, escaped from the labyrinth, King Minos sus ...

or NCR 008-0127211

Daedalus In Greek mythology, Daedalus (, ; Greek: Δαίδαλος; Latin: ''Daedalus''; Etruscan: ''Taitale'') was a skillful architect and craftsman, seen as a symbol of wisdom, knowledge and power. He is the father of Icarus, the uncle of Perdi ...

chip ** Intel N82586 PHY controller chip ** IRQ, boot ROM, and boot ROM base address configured with a four-position DIP switch block at top of card ** NCR part number 601-0068991 ** AT&T part number 3399-F170 * Half-length ISA card **

SMB connector SMB (''SubMiniature version B'') connectors are coaxial RF connectors developed in the 1960s. SMB connectors are smaller than SMA connectors. They feature a snap-on coupling and are available in either 50 Ω or 75 Ω impedance. They o ...

** NCR 008-0126998 HOLI chip **Intel N82586 PHY controller chip ** IRQ, boot ROM, and boot ROM base address configured with a four-position DIP switch block at top of card **AT&T part number 3399-K602. *Full-length

MCA MCA may refer to: Astronomy * Mars-crossing asteroid, an asteroid whose orbit crosses that of Mars Aviation * Minimum crossing altitude, a minimum obstacle crossing altitude for fixes on published airways * Medium Combat Aircraft, a 5th gen ...

card **F connector **NCR 008-0127216 HOLI chip **NCR 008-0126999 Icarus chip **NCR 8-127000A socketed DES encryption chip **Intel N82586 PHY controller chip **MCA id number 6A14. *

** Large EAM (External Antenna Module) ** Intel i82593 PHY controller chip ** AT&T part number 3399-K080 ** Compaq/DEC Roamabout part number: DEINA-AA.

2.4 GHz

* Full-length ISA card **Fixed frequency ** IRQ, boot ROM, and boot ROM base address configured with a four-position DIP switch block at top of card * Half-length ISA card **SMB connector **Selectable frequency **

Symbios Logic Symbios Logic was a manufacturer of SCSI host adapter chipsets and disk array storage subsystems. It was originally established as the NCR Microelectronics division of NCR Corporation in 1972, before NCR's takeover by AT&T Corporation in 1991. In ...

008-0126998 HOLI chip ** Intel N82586 PHY controller chip ** IRQ, boot ROM, and boot ROM base address configured with a four-position DIP switch block at top of card **AT&T part number 3399-K635. *Full-length

card **SMB connector **NCR 008-0127216 HOLI chip **NCR 008-0127211 Daedalus chip **NCR 8-127000A socketed DES encryption chip **Intel N82586 PHY controller chip **AT&T part number 3399-K066 **MCA id number 6A14. * PC card - 2.4 GHz, selectable frequency, large EAM (External Antenna Module). ** Intel N82593 PHY controller chip **AT&T part number: AT&T 3399-K624. **Lucent part number: LUC 3399-K644. **Compaq/DEC Roamabout part number: DEIRB-xx.

Options

* DES encryption chip. Part number 3399-K972. * Boot ROM chip. Part number 3399-K973.

Citations

References

External links

NCR's HTTP site with a selection of WaveLAN drivers and documentation
* tp://ftp.uniroma2.it/Digital/support/RoamAbout/ FTP mirror site of DEC's ftp server with a selection of RoamAbout drivers and documentation
Detailed analysis of WaveLAN ISA cards
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20070928031138/http://www.byte.com/art/9506/sec11/art1.htm Wayback machine archive of Byte Magazine's review of WaveLANbr>Wayback machine archive for Wavelan Classic products
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wavelan Wireless networking Network access NCR Corporation products