Talk:IBM 11b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter

Despite the fact that the pci.ids file claims this to be an a/b/g part, it is not.

Atheros uses a confusing mix of chips to deliver different solution, which typically consist of two chips (newer single-chip solutions also exist). The first chip implements amongst others the PCI interface, and is what you see with lspci.
The second chip implements the radio and can either be a single-band 2.4GHz, or a dual-band 2.4/5GHz radio
In the case of the "IBM 11b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter", a single-band 2.4GHz radio was used, limiting you to 802.11b/g functionality.

There is no way of detecting the Radio chip from lspci, other then making a guess based upon the sub-vendor ID.