Thinkpads Forum

I read the technical documentation for the Intel Pro 3945ABG WiFi chip . It looks as if it operates on different channels in different countries due to regulatory limitations. If I understand it right, it operates on channels 1-11 in the U.S. and channels 1-13 in Europe and Japan.

The Lenovo documentation shows the same model/part number for their European and U.S. models. Since it looks like I found a firmware for my Linksys access point that extends it to 1-13, I thought it may be a nice securty feature, to switch my home network to channel 13 as it is uncommon in the U.S.

Is there a way to change the channel range on the Intel Pro 3945ABG? Maybe by using a European driver etc?

There is some regulations in different countries so you are right about 1-11 for North America (but also Spain) and 1-13 for the rest of Europe. Japan got 1-14 though.
In most cases i think the hardware and driver is the same, but for some wlan cards you can choose to enable channel 12-13 like the atheros where you enable the extended channels in device manager. For Intel i thought the channel 12-13 was available by default also in the US, but if not i'm pretty sure it's just a registry setting. On my computer 12 and 13 is available by default and the only way for the driver to know i'm not in the US is my regional settings since the OS and software is all US English.

I cannot see a good reason to use a channel 13 in the US though. If you want your wireless to be secure i would recommend to use the security features your equipment support like WEP, WPA, WPA2 or whatever it support. The regulation is there for a reason and i think using channel 13 would be a false feeling of being secure. If a hacker cannot figure out how to use channel 13 i find it hard to believe that he would be able to break a WEP key or WPA.

So when you change the linksys to use channel 13 you are no longer able to connect?