How to disable /b and /a/g rates?

[Johannes Berg]

On Tue, 2015-03-10 at 12:27 -0700, Ben Greear wrote:

> Regardless of how good of an idea this is for real-world deployment,
> would it actually be OK per the wifi spec to disable all basic rates?

You seem to be confusing a few things. You cannot "disable all basic
rates", as the AP determines which rates are basic rates. Certainly, if
the AP doesn't advertise a rate, then it can also not be marked as a
basic rate.

Perhaps you're thinking of mandatory rates, i.e. rates which a given PHY
has to support (e.g. "1, 2, 5.5, 6, 11, 12, and 24 Mb/s" in ERP PHYs
[Clause 19]). I don't think you *can* really disable those. Clearly you
can opt never to use them for transmission, and you can try to prevent
clients from using them by not advertising them as supported. However,
doing that would not be spec compliant I think.

As the spec allows control response frames to be carried in HT PPDUs
when the original frame is (see 9.7.6.5.3) this may still actually
mostly be possible to pull off though.

johannes