Hopefully, you haven't just bought any new 802.11b wireless hubs and network interface cards (NIC)s. You have? Oy. Well, if the equipment's just for you and junior to blast Diablo II monsters on the home network, then no sweat. But if you're still outfitting your offices with 802.11b, now is the time to stop, and return anything that's still in the box.

OK, so it's not the end of the world, but 802.11b has this little performance problem when it comes to the workplace. Its highly theoretical 11 Mbps throughput usually comes in a not-so-stellar 4 Mbps, and even the slowest Ethernet cards in use more than double that speed. Of course, that's if you don't have any newfangled 2.4-GHz portable phones in the office; then 802.11b's performance is even worse.

Though 802.11b makes wireless LANs workable, it doesn't make them great. For great, you need 802.11a and, guess what? 802.11a devices are so close to shipping that you can almost run on them today.

You see, unlike 802.11b, 802.11a can theoretically run as fast as 54Mbps. And, more importantly, in practice, it can run at around 20 to 23Mbps. That, if you're keeping score, makes it much faster than good, old 10Mbps wired Ethernet and puts it within shooting range of 100Mbps Fast Ethernet. In other words, 802.11a gives you the performance a modern office really needs unlike 802.11b, which barely makes the grade.

This isn't one of those trivial upgrades like the difference between a 1.2 and a 1.3 MHz Pentium system. Unless you run benchmarks or a program like Adobe PhotoShop that will take every cycle you can give it, you'll never see the difference in speed between PCs. With 802.11a though, the difference is as great as dawn's first light and high noon.

How big is it? You can access CDs on a server with 802.11b and you'll drum your fingers a bit as the data swims over the air to your PC, but it's OK. With 802.11a, you can run a DVD of Die Hard off a server and catch every boom and bang. (This may not be a common use of 802.11a at your company, but you get the point.)

802.11a pulls this trick off in several ways. One is simply that it runs at a higher frequency: 5GHz instead of 2.5GHz. Besides avoiding interference, you can pack more bandwidth in the signal by running at 5GHz. The downside of this is that, unless you boost the signal's power, you lose range. Because it seems like a day can't go by without someone finding another hole in the Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP) protocol, maybe making life harder on the corporate spy with a wireless laptop parked in the company parking lot isn't such a bad thing.

Besides range trouble and all, 802.11a is always faster than 802.11b at any distance both can cover. For example, when 802.11b in ideal conditions is down to 2Mbps, 802.11a is still buzzing along at 11Mbps. Which one would you rather have?

Several companies are implementing 802.11a as fast as they can. But the leader is Atheros Communications with its Atheros AR5000 chipset. The chipset is in production, and you can expect to see hubs and actual "stick in the machine and run" NICs from Card Access, Intermec, and Proxim in early 2002. Cisco, Intersil, and Lucent will be charging up from behind with their own 802.11a implementations by the 2nd quarter of 2002.

802.11a is so much better than 802.11b that it's going to blow it away. By this time next year, the only place you'll find the 'B' stuff is in the discount rack. Unless you want to find your career as a wireless network administrator right beside it, it's time to start planning your 802.11a switchover. Its speed really is that much better.

Steven has written about technology for more than 15 years. He was previously a programmer and network administrator for NASA and the Department of Defense. Steven is also a popular speaker at technology trade shows, and is currently chairman of the Internet Press Guild. You can reach Steven at sjvn@vnal.com.