During a tenth anniversary bash it held last week at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Netgear did its darnedest to disprove recent reports of a lack of interoperability among different chipset vendors’ products based on the IEEE 802.11n Draft 1.0 standard.

You may recall that I reported in this space last month that tests conducted in April by the Farpoint Group, a wireless consultancy, revealed a lack of interoperability among Wi-Fi products labeled “Draft N-compliant” based on chipsets from Broadcom and Marvell (and AirGo, though AirGo doesn’t claim 11n draft compliance). The exhaustive tests also indicated that no throughput increase was achievable with these early-to-market products.

At its shindig last week, however, Netgear took pains to demonstrate Netgear products based on Atheros, Broadcom, and Marvell Wi-Fi chip technologies interworkings at speeds of 260M to 270Mbps with multiple high-bandwidth functions taking place simultaneously on the wireless network. Amazingly, product managers from the three chipmaker companies - usually so fiercely competitive that their legal departments often forbid them from talking to one another - appeared in the same room for a panel session and informal Q&A afterwards.

Why the discrepancy between Farpoint Group’s April tests and last week’s demo? I spoke with Mahesh Venkatraman, Marvell director of product marketing, after the presentation. Venkatraman said the problem in the Farpoint tests related to the fact that the method for beaconing the service set identifier (SSID), or name of the access point, so that the client can discover it and associate with it, had been implemented differently in each of the chipmakers designs, because it was one of the outstanding issues in the Draft N specification still receiving comments. So wireless devices based on different chips couldn’t find each other.

Venkatraman said the three chipmakers approached the IEEE for direction on which way to accomplish this task and have changed their designs since the Farpoint Group study.

For widespread enterprise use, though, 802.11n is still maturing. The standard won’t be finalized till late next year, and Clay Raborn, a product marketing manager from Dell present on the Netgear panel, wouldn’t venture a guess as to when 11n connections would be embedded in his company’s laptops.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.