* Dealing with 802.11n
The industry drama that surrounds 802.11n continues.
Standards for the next-generation wireless LAN, which offers two to 10 times the speeds of today’s WLANs and potentially doubles their coverage range, have progressed. And Intel has announced an 11n chipset it says will be available in PCs from Acer, Asus, and Toshiba at about the time you are reading this newsletter.
Bear in mind, most pre-standards vendor activity really targets delivering multimedia content wirelessly to the residential market, rather than empowering enterprises anytime soon. However, as we’ve learned from past experience, technology embraced in the home quickly ends up at the office – whether or not officially sanctioned by business policy. So get ready to set a policy for dealing with the pre-standard 802.11n clients and access points your employees will smuggle into your organization.
So what’s happened? A second draft of 802.11n (temporarily called Draft 1.10) was approved last week and is en route to the IEEE 802.11n committee as Draft 2.0. Reportedly, the 300 outstanding comments on the draft, many of which dealt with tuning the standard to better address consumer-class wireless applications, have been resolved. Still, though, the formal, final publication of the standard isn’t expected until October 2008 because of the lengthy and complex IEEE approval process.
Meanwhile, Intel said last week that it has released a draft-802.11n-based chipset for its Intel Centrino Duo mobile technology. The company said it has an interoperability program going, called “Connect with Centrino,” whereby it has worked with Asus, Belkin, Buffalo, D-Link and NetGear to “better ensure” compatibility and performance between these companies’ access points and Centrino mobile client devices and to give buyers “more confidence” in compatibility. The verbiage seems a bit of a hedge on the depth of the commitment Intel is making to 11n interoperability.
David Hofer, director of wireless marketing for Intel’s Mobile Platforms Group, admits there’s also no guarantee of upgradeability to the final standards.
Meanwhile, where’s Linksys in all this?
In testing, says Hofer, and we should “expect an announcement later.”
These pre-standard products have a place for early-adopter home users who want to extend their triple-play home networking services wirelessly. For enterprises with large-scale investments and manageability concerns, however, be advised that these products, including Intel’s, don’t guarantee interoperability among different vendors’ products or upgradeability to the eventual standards-based products.
