Hello,
I wonder if anyone has documented the situation of the IETF wireless network and analyzed the experienced difficulties? I'd be interested in looking at the causes of the difficulties. There's a lot of anecdotal information about the capabilities of the protocols and advice on what to do on this list. But it would be good to know what was the real cause of difficulties. Say, its pretty useless to authenticate beacons if the radios are simply swamped by too many nodes who think they are access points. Similarly, access control a la 802.1X does not help if the interferences are caused during or before access authentication has taken place. Or a correctly operating radio network is no good if all of its capacity is used by the legitimate, but infected, hosts for something non-productive. The bottom line is that finger pointing (staff, ieee, fcc, ourselves...), if useful at all, should come after we find out what happened.
I suspect the IETF network is pretty the worst case scenario for current wireless LANs (or can someone point an even more demanding case?). But what we do today will be done tomorrow by regular users...
--Jari