This week my ARA (Advanced Networks class) lab students got the chance to work with some recent equipment acquired by the department. The equipment consists of several enterprise grade CISCO networks wireless units (Access Points and Network cards) that most of them will eventually deploy in their future careers, and have during these labs classes the chance to a have a first contact with.
The curiosity here lies on the fact that Beacon Periods in CISCO equipments do not use “standard” time units.. they use something called Kusec. What ?! a Kilo Micro Second ? In my days (and guess wikipedia days…) Kilo meant 103 and Micro meant 10?6 which would mean 10-3 or good old Milli. So where from does Kusec comes from? Kusec equals (according to CISCO) 1024 microseconds… hmmm shouldn’t it be then a Kibi Micro Second ? and therefore Kiusec ? And whats wrong with miliseconds ? All other vendors have the Beacon Periods configured in milliseconds…
If you have a good answer drop me a comment, because I would like to know the “added” value of using such a bizarre time unit.