New WLAN group causes standards strife

The formation last week of a consortium for high-speed wireless LANs brings together more than two dozen vendors from both sides of an ongoing standards debate, but a prominent chip vendor believes core members of the group have sidestepped and disrupted the standards process.

Intel, Broadcom, Atheros and Cisco, among others, last week announced the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC) with the stated intention of breaking a deadlock over the IEEE 802.11n specification. That emerging standard is designed to boost real-world wireless-LAN throughput to at least 100M bit/sec.

However, Airgo, one of the biggest vendors of chips used in pre-standard high-speed gear, says the chip vendors behind the EWC are disrupting the standards process and causing further delay.

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The formation last week of a consortium for high-speed wireless LANs brings together more than two dozen vendors from both sides of an ongoing standards debate, but a prominent chip vendor believes core members of the group have sidestepped and disrupted the standards process.

Intel, Broadcom, Atheros and Cisco, among others, last week announced the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC) with the stated intention of breaking a deadlock over the IEEE 802.11n specification. That emerging standard is designed to boost real-world wireless-LAN throughput to at least 100M bit/sec.

However, Airgo, one of the biggest vendors of chips used in pre-standard high-speed gear, says the chip vendors behind the EWC are disrupting the standards process and causing further delay.

Negotiations over 802.11n had been characterized by conflict between two groups of vendors, called World-Wide Spectrum Efficiency (WWiSE) and TGn Sync, each pushing different ways of increasing WLAN speed.

Earlier this year, Broadcom and Airgo Motorola were members of WWiSE, and Intel, Atheros and Cisco belonged to TGn Sync. The battle between those factions has caused 802.11n to take much longer to develop than previous specifications, according to industry analysts.

For any proposal to be adopted, IEEE rules require approval by 75% of the standard's task group. In July the 802.11n group was deadlocked, with neither WWiSE nor TGn Sync able to garner much support. A joint proposal committee was formed so backers of both plans could come up with a compromise and bring it back to the IEEE task group. That wasn't working, says Bill McFarland, CTO at Atheros.

"For whatever reason, that organization was not able to make very rapid progress," McFarland says. "When we got together this other group of companies, they moved very rapidly to create a complete specification." Forming the EWC required compromise among the members, McFarland says.

The formation of EWC "really is just one particular set of compromises that merges WWiSE and TGn Sync together," he said. EWC members believe the group's specification has enough support to be approved by the 802.11n task group at its November meeting.

"We think we're getting there," says Bill Bunch, director of product marketing for WLAN at Broadcom. "We think it makes a lot of sense to a lot of the voters," he says.

In the meantime, none of the companies has stopped work on the joint proposal committee, he adds.

Airgo, which has not joined the EWC, sees the situation differently. As soon as the joint proposal committee started meeting, major chip vendors at the core of the EWC were working on setting up that group behind the scenes, says Greg Raleigh, president and CEO at Airgo.

"At the very first face-to-face meeting . . . this group was having private side conferences explaining that they were already developing silicon to a third specification," Raleigh says, adding that some members had access to the EWC specification ahead of others because of a "discriminatory policy" by the group.