* Draft-802.11n development marches forward, though standard might see delay
Wireless LAN vendors, one by one, have been opening their kimonos about their strategies to support the forthcoming 802.11n standard, still in draft form. These discussions usually also address how Wi-Fi architectures are evolving to support the much bigger traffic loads that will eventually arrive to fill 802.11n’s generous, airy pipes.
Trapeze is the latest to put a stake in the ground. It plans to ship a Draft-N-capable access point in or near the fourth quarter that supports four spatial streams to deliver theoretical throughput of 300Mbps in the 2.4GHz band and another 300Mbps in the 5GHz band, says David Cohen, director of product marketing. Several months ago, Trapeze announced its “Smart Mobile” architecture – which distributes data forwarding out to the access points – to alleviate WLAN controller bottlenecks that might come about with 802.11n.
Cisco has been notoriously quiet about 802.11n and these emerging “hybrid” architectures, which split the data and management planes to give back-end infrastructure some relief and to alleviate latency.
However, Cisco has a Draft N access point that is being included in the product test bed that the Wi-Fi Alliance announced last week. The alliance is set to begin certifying pre-standard, 802.11n Draft 2.0-compliant products for interoperability with one another next month against a test bed of Draft N products. The test bed components include access points, routers, and chipsets from Atheros, Broadcom, Cisco, Intel, Marvell, and Ralink.
So, obviously, Cisco has something fairly mature in development.
In a statement, meanwhile, the company said it sees select segments of the enterprise market with an interest in pre-standard 802.11n, but that it doesn’t see the demand as widespread. The company added that, given that there isn’t a 100% guarantee of compatibility and/or software upgradeability between 80.11n Draft 2.0 and the eventual final standard, “Cisco, along with several major industry analysts, recommends caution in deploying it.”
Finally, Cisco said it will announce products when it has an offering that is shipping and that its product timing will be based on the test bed process, client availability, and other factors.
Meanwhile, at press time, there was a rumor going around that the ratification date of the final 802.11n standard, long expected to be fall 2008, might be pushed back to first-quarter 2009. However, no formal announcement had yet been made about the change.
