increasing frustration with wpi0

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

I'm finding my wpi0 device (Thinkpad T61, 5.99.8-amd64 from about two
months ago) less and less useful.  Far too often, it just isn't seeing
access points that are very usable by other devices.  This was the case
at the last 3 hotels I stayed at (no encryption), as well as a recent
meeting (WPA2).  At this latter, not only were all the MacOS and
Windows users happy, there were happy FreeBSD users as well, and I
thought our stack was very similar to that one.  Problems have occurred
with static SSID configuration, with or without WEP, or with
wpa_supplicant running (cleartext, WEP, and WPA2).  (My daughter
reports similar frustration with T61 running 5.0rcSomething.)

On the other hand, it works just fine in my house and in a friend's
place, with both WEP (multiple access points) and 802.11a/WPA2.

On these trips, I've been able to use an EVDO wireless card.  That
won't be a useful work-around when I travel outside the US, which
includes my next two trips.

Does anyone have any suggestions or workarounds?  Does anyone know what
the problem is?  I suspect that one factor is wireless load -- if
there's too much traffic or two many endpoints, it fails.


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb