Lewis G Rosenthal wrote:

Greetings, all...

I'm having a bit of fun with a new device, and I also have a shameless plug to put forth...

Many of you are familiar with Hautspot, LLC, our Wi-Fi hotspot management company. On July 16, Hautspot, LLC (http://www.hautspot.com) signed an agreement with Clearwire to become the first Platinum Distributor for their CLEAR WiMAX broadband service (http://www.clear.com) in the Washington, DC metro area. CLEAR is marketed as 4G, which is a bit too "cell phone-like" for my taste, but if you're familiar with the new HTC EVO 4G phone on Sprint, the 4G data connection on the back end is arranged through CLEAR (Sprint is a majority stockholder in Clearwire).

How does this tie into my subject?

One of CLEAR's devices is something called the CLEAR Spot. Essentially, it's a WiMAX broadband router with a Wi-Fi AP in it. So, up to 8 devices may connect over the air to it via 802.11b or g, and its broadband connection is WiMAX, over the CLEAR network. The CLEAR Spot 4G+ has the ability to switch to the 3G cellular network where 4G coverage is not available.

For some reason, I can't get my T43 with an Intel 2915abg card to associate with the CLEAR Spot. In fact, on a T61 with a 4965agn card, I can't even see the blasted AP (I am able to see it in a list of APs on the T43, however). I'm not sure whether it's an OS/2-thing or a hardware issue, as I broke my XP installation on the ThinkPad some time ago, and haven't had the need to fix it (until now).

So, the point is, I see the AP, and even with all encryption in the device turned off, I cannot associate with it. Has anyone else seen this type of behavior with any other AP, or with a CLEAR Spot 4G+? My Pal Pre Plus connects without complaint, and my brother's Blackberry Bold 9700 does the same. I'll test his T43, next, as our machines are identical, and both running eCS 1.2R.

TIA

If I understand correctly you are describing a device similar to the MyFi for 3G wireless (only this unit is WiMAX rather than 3G) - As we don't have WiMAX over here as yet, the best we have is Next-G (3.5G efferctively) still using cell phone technology but at "up to" 7.2Mb/s download link speed (more normally about 1.5Mb/s - which isn't bad on-the-road in any case). For this I use a Netcomm T1 mobile Wifi-N/3G-NextG router - that connects to the internet either via the Cell phone network or cabled via your ADSL/Cable modem. I can connect to this from either eCS or Windows XP at 54Mb/s (802.11G) but the XP machine (the only one with WiFi-N, cannot connect at N speeds). The Windows XP system is a Lenovo Thinkpad X200s. I wonder if you disable N speeds in your AP whether the systems will all connect at G speeds? As your WiMAX speed wont exceed 54Mb/s I guess, you're not losing anything by turning the router back to 802.11G.

Just a  suggestion.