Ratification of 802.11n WLAN standard will usher in new features

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 13 September 2009 04:45

IT Industry - Strategy

"At the end of this month the WiFi Alliance is launching an new certification programme. If vendors support some of these optional features they will be able to certify them. One of those is three streams. Another is the transmission of aggregate frames. 802.11 achieves a lot of its speed gains by being a lot more efficient, not just by just going faster."

He added that the timeframe for product availability would depend largely on chipmakers. "Building the chip that has four little radios that don't interfere with each other is a much more complicated problem [than writing the specification]...It is easy to standardise ahead of products...It is now time for the hardware to catch up."

As a manufacturer of end products, Trapeze Networks' timeframe is dependent on the chipmakers, and Gast declined to speculate on when chips implementing these new features might become available.

Commenting on the lengthy evolution of the new 802.11n standard, he said: "We have learnt some lessons from it. The first one is that if you are designing network equipment it had better be interoperable. Although the standards process took a long time we were able to deliver benefits early on with the draft certification programme. There is an important lesson there in producing something early and sticking to it. That was a new concept. If you look back at the 801.11d days there were interoperability issues late in the standardisation process."

Publication of the new standard whose full title is "Information Technology—Telecommunications and information exchange between systems—Local and metropolitan area networks—Specific requirements Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications Amendment 5: Enhancements for Higher Throughput-2009" is scheduled for mid-October. It will be purchasable online from the IEEE.