802.11n standard not expected until 2008

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 15 August 2006 16:48

Business IT - Technology

Efforts to develop the next generation wireless local area network standard, 802.11n, have hit further delays likely to push finalisation out to 2008 and leave draft 802.11n products non-upgradeable.

The draft standard was issued in January 2006  and a number of vendors including Linksys  and Netgear  rushed products conforming to the draft standard onto the market, but almost immediately warnings were sounded  that more work was needed on the draft standard: work that might leave these products non-upgradeable.

A vote was held  on Draft 1.0 of the proposed 802.11n standard in May, but an insufficient number of members voted to pass the draft. Now, the IEEE working group is reported to be sifting through 12,000 comments on the rejected draft, as a result of which a revised draft is not expected to be ready until late 2007.

The final standard is expected to achieve throughput of up to 300 Mbps using MIMO (multiple input output) technology. However several vendors, notably Airgo, are touting proprietary MIMO implementations  as achieving this throughput today without the problems of interference with earlier WiFi systems such as 802.11g that it is claimed the draft N products suffer from.