Forum

All:

Joshua is right on the money regarding Wi-Fi "root bridge" and IEEE 802.1D Spanning Tree Protocol "root bridge" being different.

Besides that, IEEE 802.11 knows nothing of wireless bridges, wireless repeaters, wireless work group bridges, wireless root bridges, etc. These are all marketing speak, and the speakers seldom publish their specifications nor define their terms.

I hope this helps. Thanks. /criss

Criss and Joshua:

I don't recall ever seeing that addressed in the text. But I know I've missed a lot of other things there already!

Our old Orinoco WavePoint II's, AP1000's, and definitely have STP, as do our Cisco 1231's. Cisco 1300's do also. To see how a wireless bridge works with STP, have a look at:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5861/products_configuration_guide_chapter09186a008021e5d3.html

The key difference in terminology for wireless bridges seems to be the idea of point to point bridges vs point to multipoint bridges. Point to point is like the traditional wired network bridge. The multipoint situation requires a "root" or center bridge, which Joshua and Cris pointed our are in fact different from the STP bridge.

I see a lot of SOHO marketing terminology that gradually confuses pro terminology. Another example is hub vs. switch - most people call them hubs, but most are indeed switches.

A wiseguy once told me that data communications is a modern Tower of Babel because engineers scored high on the math SAT and low on their verbals ... ;^)

=seymour=