CES may make wireless LANs hot again

Advances in pre-11n Wi-Fi gear herald high performance; Wi-Fi Alliance airs new protection scheme.

LAS VEGAS -- Wi-Fi LANs are now such a routine part of computing life for so many users that it’s hard to imagine getting excited about them again.

But this year’s giant Consumer Electronics Show, drawing an estimated 140,000 attendees and here, may succeed in doing just that.

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LAS VEGAS -- Wi-Fi LANs are now such a routine part of computing life for so many users that it’s hard to imagine getting excited about them again.

But this year’s giant Consumer Electronics Show, drawing an estimated 140,000 attendees and here, may succeed in doing just that.

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Wireless LAN chipmakers and equipment manufacturers are showcasing advances in the next generation of Wi-Fi: products based on Draft 1 of the still-developing 802.11n standard. So-called pre-11n adapters and access points exploded in the home and small and midsize business markets last year, offering throughput rates typically of 80M to 100Mbps in the 2.4GHz band, far above the 19M to 23Mbps throughput usually realized by 802.11g gear.

But at CES, attendees can see new WLAN access points (compare WLAN products) that deliver two or three times that throughput, and do so simultaneously on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, with as many as 27 channels total. It’s still true that the bandwidth is shared by all the users on a given access point. But these new products make possible WLANs with the capacity, sustained throughput, reliability and range for demanding applications and pervasive connectivity.

And in a key innovation, chipmakers are now dramatically improving their network processors, which are packaged with the radio chipsets in access points and routers, to manage the flood of data, voice, video and audio packets that 11n will create. That data flood will overwhelm the current generation of processors.

Finally, the Wi-Fi Alliance, which originated the term “Wi-Fi,” this week unveils a new industry specification called Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), a standard that’s intended to make it much simpler for buyers of Wi-Fi gear to create very secure wireless connections. And it may well push enterprise users to demand a new simplicity and effectiveness in securing corporate WLANs and mobile employees.

The 802.11n high-throughput standard is based mainly on the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology. MIMO uses the same modulation scheme as 802.11a and 11g, but it also uses two, three or more antennas on both sides of a wireless link, some special signal processing, and a technique called spatial multiplexing. MIMO breaks a single data stream into two, three or more slower -- and therefore more stable and reliable -- substreams that are reassembled on the other end. MIMO dramatically increases the amount of data possible on the link, and enables sustained higher rates over longer distances than do today’s WLANs.

MIMO itself isn’t new, but what the vendors are doing with this year’s CES announcements is. The newest products are based on the current Draft 1 of the 11n standard. The IEEE 11n working group meets later this month and is expected to take a critical next step in finalizing what will become Draft 2. If the IEEE stays on schedule, that draft should become final in the next couple of months, triggering a new certification testing program by the Wi-Fi Alliance in April or May, as well as a wave of Draft 2-compliant products in the latter half of 2007.