* Beware vendor claims of 802.11n 'compliance'
The ruckus over premature “802.11n” product labeling continues.
Recent benchmark and interoperability tests of products that claim “compliance” with the 802.11n draft standard weren’t able to make the product transmit any faster or over any greater range than existing standard 802.11g products. And they don’t interoperate with each other.
The tests were conducted by Farpoint Group, led by industry veteran Craig Mathias, in April.
As mentioned last week, the IEEE is still smoothing out a number of technical and editorial details on Draft 1.0 802.11n, the emerging standard for 100Mbps-and-up wireless LANs that use multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) technology. MIMO takes advantage of multipath interference among multiple antennas at the source and destination radios to actually improve data rates.
Farpoint Group tested the following devices (none enterprise-class):
* Buffalo AirStation Nfiniti, based on Broadcom Intensi-fi radio chip technology.
* Linksys SRX400, based on Airgo radio chip technology.
* Netgear RangeMAX Next, based on Marvell TopDog technology.
* Netgear RangeMax Next, based on Broadcom Intensi-fi technology (and confusingly named almost identically to its Marvell-based product).
The Linksys Wireless-G, based on Broadcom BCM94603MP technology was also included in the testing as a reference point to non-MIMO products.
For interoperability, Farpoint performed tests over ranges of about 15 feet and was not successful in getting any heterogeneous combination of the “draft compliant” clients and wireless routers to connect at speeds more than average 802.11g rates (20M-24Mbps).
Farpoint’s findings were, basically, that “range vs. throughput performance was relatively poor, security implementations need work, and the interoperability implied by the ‘draft-compliant’ labeling seems to be missing,” according to the resulting Farpoint Technical Note.
The Linksys SRX-400 was the only product that boosted range and throughput in a homogeneous environment, and it does not claim draft compliance. It was built before the January draft approval on third-generation Airgo MIMO gear.
Bottom line: Ignore the 802.11n labeling, evaluate the product on its own merit, and don’t expect interoperability with other so-labeled “802.11n” products.
Note that Bluesocket has since announced an enterprise-class MIMO AP that it says improves performance by 30% in networks with certified 802.11a/b/g clients. Farpoint’s Mathias says he hopes to benchmark that product in a few weeks as part of a Network World test.
