* Wi-Fi buyer beware
The time it takes for formal standards to be ratified and productized is often out of sync with when users actually want the networking capabilities being standardized.
So to satisfy user requirements, proprietary solutions often emerge that work perfectly well for a long time. Sometimes, parts of the solutions become pieces of an eventual standard.
This is all old hat in the enterprise networking community. Where it is starting to get muddled is in the wireless LAN market, one of the only network areas where consumer/retail users are the early adopters and enterprise buyers follow.
Enter the nascent high-speed 802.11n standard. Some 30-plus proposals were submitted to the IEEE last month. It will be at least two years before a standard is ratified and perhaps three or four before standards-based products are available.
Yet, some vendors are starting to put products on retail shelves with “pre-N” vernacular on their packaging. Their resemblance to “N” is that they support the basic multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology likely to be used in 802.11n that delivers much higher speeds at greater distances. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess what the standard will eventually look like.
Bottom line: If there are products available with benefits that you need now, you should consider using them. Just be fully aware of what they will and won’t interoperate with in the future and what impact that will have on you. As a consumer, who might purchase one access point to use at home, you might not care much if the high-speed technology will never interoperate with a “standard” 802.11n AP in three or four years.
But as an enterprise buyer, if you were to go out and buy 4,000 of the things only to learn later that “Pre-N” didn’t reflect any resemblance to standards, you might care. On that scale, complete replacements translate into significant labor and costs, not to mention downtime while you do it.
The Wi-Fi Alliance “discourages” the use of N-related marketing-ese on Wi-Fi packaging ahead of standards, particularly since the mechanism for defining backward-compatibility with standardized 802.11a/b/g products has, of course, not yet been decided. If any early “n” products are discovered to interfere with Wi-Fi-certified a/b/g products, they will be denied Wi-Fi certification.
Meantime, Airgo Networks, the wireless chipset maker that pioneered MIMO technology, said it has gained regulatory certification of its product reference designs on its “early N” products. The go-aheads have been received from the FCC, as well as the regulatory agencies in Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, and New Zealand. Internationally-certified compliance with spectrum emission standards means that the MIMO OFDM-based products can be sold and used in all these countries.
