Today is one of those days you’ll always remember – and where you were when 802.11g, that mainstay of wireless LANs for, well, essentially forever, died. Yes, it happened today, as wireless-LAN chip leader Atheros Communications announced what I think will be the first of many replacements for 802.11g – and it is based on, no surprise so far, 802.11n. But many out there are unaware that all that MIMO stuff that makes .11n so cool (and more expensive than .11g) is, in fact, an optional element of the standard. There’s a single-stream (one radio on each end) mode that will cost no more to implement than 802.11g, but offers 75 to 150 Mbps (peak) in 20 and 40 MHz. channel modes, respectively. That’s 3X the upper-bound throughput for about 1X the price – and that’s also pretty cool.
And so Atheros’ announcement is their new Align product family, which will usher in the era of mainstream .11n and a whole bunch of single-stream .11n products, marks the demise of 802.11g. No worry about incompatibilities, by the way; these radios will run in backwards-compliant .11g mode, and will feature in this mode not just improved throughput, but also improved reliability and range as well. There is simply no longer any reason, at least as of the time in the near future when products incorporating these components hit the shelves, to buy .11g-only products, or even combined .11g/a products. .11n is now all that matters. The only concern I have is how products based on the different variants in .11n will be marketed; I suspect confusion will be an issue until the Wi-Fi Alliance settles on nomenclature.
It’s unlikely, by the way, that current Align products will form the basis of a broad deployment of .11n in handsets. A chip for that purpose is on the way, and, I suspect, from multiple vendors. But the notebook (and likely MID) market will be 100% .11n pretty much on the schedule I forecast long ago – the first quarter of 2009.
And, just in case there’s any question, it is absolutely time to phase out all those old .11b adapters that only support WEP. C’mon already; It’s almost 2009. Maybe we need a sunset law for Wi-Fi. But the sun is regardless setting – and rapidly – on 802.11g. Thanks for the memories, but that’s it for g.
