Hi, I was not at the last IETF, and couldn't see live the reportedly bad workings of WLAN. I am not going to make suggestions to 58crew since I'm certain they've already tried lots of configurations. Just to share our thoughts on how we make work several independent/deterministic-behaviour 802.11b subnets:
-for the general public, set the AP's with both an essid and a key, in Infrastructure mode (managed).
-for the aodv public, convene to use a different essid and a different key and ad-hoc mode. If the aodv people need several ad-hoc mode subnets, just set yet another essid+key; of course all essid's and key's must be different each compared to the other.
We have experience with several independent/deterministic-behaviour WLAN links set up that way.
But, even if this works well with several AP types and cards, there exist cards out there that only support enc at 128bit while others only at 64bit, which makes _any_ use of encryption non-portable. That says, if ietf crew decides to put a key 64bit then there will be people not able to connect. Same if it decides for 128bit.
To me, the whole story is a matter of compatibility, backward compatibility and forward compatibility between various versions of the 802.11 standards _and_ of their implementations.
It is exactly like with Word versions: it's the same Doc format but not quite depending on the Windows version too.
I do not think anyone could be blamed of "interfering" with a WLAN network, most notably because this is unlicensed spectrum; I presume harmonics of an old microwave oven could be blamed for interference with the ietf wlan as much as a user not knowing his intel laptop has centrino.
Alex