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Wikipedia / ORiNOCO

ORiNOCO was the brand name for a family of wireless networking technology by Proxim Wireless (previously Lucent). These integrated circuits (codenamed Hermes) provide wireless connectivity for 802.11-compliant Wireless LANs.

Variants

Lucent offered several variants of the PC Card, referred to by different color-based monikers:

  • White/Bronze: WaveLAN IEEE Standard 2Mbit/s PC Cards with 802.11 support.

  • Silver: WaveLAN IEEE Turbo 11Mbit/s PC Cards with 802.11b and 64-bit WEP support.

  • Gold: WaveLAN IEEE Turbo 11Mbit/s PC Cards with 802.11b and 128-bit WEP support.

Later models dropped the 'Turbo' moniker due to 802.11b 11Mbit/s becoming widespread.

Proxim, after taking over Lucent's wireless division, rebranded all their wireless cards to ORiNOCO - even cards not based on Lucent/Agere's Hermes chipset. Proxim still offers ORiNOCO-based cards under the 'Classic' brand.

Rebranded products

The WaveLAN chipsets that power ORiNOCO-branded cards were commonly used to power other wireless networking devices, and are compatible with a number of other access points, routers and wireless cards. The following brand and models utilise the chipset, or are rebrands of an ORiNOCO product:

Preferred wireless chipset for wardriving

The ORiNOCO (and their derivatives) is preferred by wardrivers, due to their high sensitivity and the ability to report the level of noise (something that other chips of the era did not report). The pre-Proxim (or 'Classic') ORiNOCO cards have a jack for attaching an external antenna.

Linux drivers

A Linux Orinoco Driver supported the IEEE 802.11b Hermes/ORiNOCO family of chips. It was included in the Linux kernel from version 2.4.3 until its removal in 6.8.

References