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Airgo, Broadcom Back Wi-Fi Alliance Plan for Draft N
Wi-Fi Certification for Draft N by June 2007
802.11n Now Expected for 2008
802.11n's Next Draft Vote in January
Mossberg Sees No Reason to Switch to Draft N
Acer Joins Draft N Devolution

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« July 2006 | Main | September 2006 »

August 29, 2006

Airgo, Broadcom Back Wi-Fi Alliance Plan for Draft N

By Glenn Fleishman

Airgo and Broadcom, rivals for Wi-Fi chip sales, said separately they support the new Wi-Fi Alliance plan for certifying Draft N gear: Airgo says they expect that putative Draft 2.0, which has a high probability of being finished for Jan. 2007 and approved for moving forward in Mar. 2007, will be such a thorough reworking that it will be an appropriate basis for products. The Wi-Fi Alliance formally announced today their timeline for certifying products based on 802.11n: for Draft 2.0 products, the first wave by June 2007; for final 802.11n ratified products, at least a year later based on a spring 2008 projection for ratification.

Airgo has consistently rejected the idea that Draft 1.0 was fully baked, and had held back while other chipmakers released early chips, none of which have seemingly been integrated in products the firmware and hardware of which can exceed 802.11g + MIMO designs from Airgo and others. (Press release not yet posted.)

Broadcom said, in a slightly parallel universe, that the Wi-Fi Alliance’s move validates the maturity of 802.11n-like products, and that while they fully support it, they’ll continue interoperability testing of current generation equipment with other chipmakers. This is only to the good, because the Wi-Fi Alliance’s managing director, Frank Hanzlik, told me yesterday that the alliance expects that manufacturers and their test labs will be conducting ongoing work that will lead to a fast path from Draft 2.0 to certified “phase one” products. (Press release not yet posted.)

Posted by Glennf at 9:49 AM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2006

Wi-Fi Certification for Draft N by June 2007

By Glenn Fleishman

The Wi-Fi Alliance said today it would offer a two-phase plan to keep 802.11n’s innovation moving along: With the next potential draft approval of the faster wireless data standard from engineering standards group IEEE’s Task Group N looking like it won’t appear until March 2007, the Wi-Fi Alliance has chosen to step in to stabilize the market. The first phase of certification will confirm compliance to what they expect will be Draft 2.0 in March, the next letter ballot in which Task Group N voters agree to an extensive set of changes to Draft 1.0. The compliance will be coupled with interoperability testing, so that devices labeled with their phase 1 branding—yet to be determined—will work together at the right speeds.

The second phase will be tied to a ratified standard, which may come by spring 2008. Ratification usually takes up to six months after final technical details are decided on and approved within a task group, so the standard will likely be gelled by fall 2007. Wi-Fi Alliance managing director Frank Hanzlik said in an interview today that should the March 2007 meeting not produce another draft, the alliance would assemble the closest possible set of agreed-on ideas to produce their certification standard. (The news was scheduled to be released tomorrow morning; News.com broke the embargo this evening.)

Products that comply with phase 1 certification for draft 802.11n could be on the market—through firmware upgrades or new hardware releases—by June 2007, but it’s likely that devices that start to hit the market by early 2007 will more and more closely conform with what will be certified. “We actually are doing a lot of formal interoperability testing within the alliance with pre-standard products,” said Hanzlik, and this ongoing work should reduce the time between the draft’s approval and certification approval. (The alliance has opened more worldwide testing labs in recent months, too, which should distribute its certification work for faster completion.)

Phase 1 products aren’t guaranteed to be forward-compatible with phase 2 products. “The forward-compatibility part is certainly too hard to call at this point; it’s not anything that the alliance is committing to,” Hanzlik said. However, they are stressing that compatibility among the phase 1 and 2 products would be highly stressed.

Phase 1 products will almost certainly have none of the optional elements for 802.11n, such as larger antenna arrays that produce higher throughputs. Some of these optional elements remain points of discussion, and will be less settled until further drafts are developed. Another major issue outstanding is the manner by which 802.11n devices will interact with legacy adapters and legacy networks, whether on the same Wi-Fi network, same Wi-Fi channel, or on adjacent Wi-Fi channels. That is expected to be resolved for the next letter-ballotted draft, which should be Draft 2.0.

This intermediate approach to 802.11n certification echoes the earlier interim security measure, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), that the alliance put into place when the work on 802.11i lingered far longer than the market and manufacturers would tolerate, with the failure of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) as a reliable link encryption method. WPA was available a year before 802.11i’s final ratification, and stabilized the security concerns of the market. The later WPA2, which included the strong AES encryption method, entered the industry with relative seamlessness.

Of course, WPA had more to do with retrofitting a security model to work on older devices without leaving newer devices with less protection, and was a good-enough security system; WPA2 almost serves a different market, in which government-grade encryption algorithms are required and fast handoff for authentication, mobile devices—like VoWLAN handsets—is critical.

With 802.11n, the standard has to work on the lowliest to most sophisticated device, and there’s a lot of hardwiring in silicon that can’t be fixed later, so the standard has to be right when devices are released. That’s been one of my primary objections to Draft N gear.

I have consistently said that you should not buy Draft N gear because there are significant advantages for most users. Buying MIMO gateways makes a lot of sense if you want better 802.11g speeds over greater areas. That technology is now relatively mature, relatively compatible, and relatively cheap. Draft N devices are quite expensive (Atheros aims to fix that by year’s end), don’t seem to deliver range and speed in testing (see this latest PC World showdown), and have no guarantee of full upgradability when the final 802.11n standard is delivered. (Intel said today they’d include Draft N support in their Santa Rosa platform in the first half of 2007, but Intel is on the board of the Wi-Fi Alliance, and thus knew this certification was coming when they made this statement.)

This process set up by the Wi-Fi Alliance answers my concerns.

First, with 802.11n’s ratification pushed back nearly a year from the expectation just a few months ago, there’s now a reason to bring today’s capabilities into today’s equipment. When ratification was just a few months away, having an entire generation of equipment that would be potentially incapable of forward compatibility or upgrade seemed ridiculous. Now, it’s a reasonable market choice given a 12-to-18-month lifespan for the right kind of user. (The equipment will obviously continue to work after the ratification, too, and have its own value as it will retain interoperability and other benefits that current Draft N devices can’t guarantee.)

Second, the Wi-Fi Alliance is waiting for Draft 2.0 or its equivalent. This allows a host of compromises to be made in the year between Draft 1.0 and 2.0, and technical problems to be solved. There should be an ocean of difference from Draft 1.0 to 2.0 in terms of basic problems being solved. Today’s Draft N devices promise compliance to a draft that will be superceded, and offer no hardware upgrade promise when and if that happens if firmware upgrades fail to suffice.

Third, the alliance will offer a brand that I confirmed with Hanzlik will be clearly differentiated in phase 1 and 2. This won’t offer consumers or businesses any implicit promise about forward compatibility. This reduces confusion in the marketplace and provides a clear message to equipment buyers that they are buying gear that may be superceded later, but has value now.

Fourth, the interoperability and conformance testing by the Wi-Fi Alliance will smooth out the rough spots in using devices from different manufacturers together. Some early equipment plays very poorly with its friends (similar devices from other makers) and neighbors (nearby networks). The alliance’s process has worked in the past.

So, I can’t say right now, go out and buy Phase One gear, because it has no name and doesn’t exist. But I will predict with some degree of certainty that devices that start shipping in late winter 2007 will likely offer enough carrots for those who need higher performance or greater area networks to start thinking about purchase, and what’s for sale by June 2007 (and certified) will be good investments in the next generation of Wi-Fi.

Posted by Glennf at 5:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 15, 2006

802.11n Now Expected for 2008

By Glenn Fleishman

News.com reports that the final ratified version of 802.11n probably will hit in 2008: The ratification means that the full IEEE has accepted a final version of the standard, and will publish it in that form. The work is typically done as long as six months or longer before ratification, so this doesn’t mean that a “final” version will take until 2008, but rather that the absolute final version will take that long.

With a new draft now slated for January 2007 incorporating or responding to the thousands of technical changes noted for Draft 1.0, News.com reports that it’s extremely likely that the next draft will not allow a firmware upgrade for Draft N devices currently on the market. (Also, what’s the generation numbering here? If you ship Draft N in May 2006, and it’s incompatible with Draft N in January 2007, as it may be, do you call this Draft N2? Drafter N?)

I should reiterate that there’s nothing certain in life, and it’s possible that chipmakers have been exceptionally clever and flexible, and will be able to produce better and better 802.11n equipment while still enabling firmware or other backwards compatible with their earliest-shipped chips.

At this point, we’ll have to wait about six months to find out.

Posted by Glennf at 2:06 PM | Comments (0)

August 11, 2006

802.11n's Next Draft Vote in January

By Glenn Fleishman

Draft 2.0 will likely not be voted on until January: This puts a crimp in the earlier predictions that Draft 1.0 might be adopted (it wasn’t), and that Draft 2.0 of the next-generation wireless data spec could be ready to go by, say, September. Nope. There were 12,000 comments presented, and even after removing duplicates and what sounds like irritating editorial comments, they’re still slogging through the issues. (Atheros’s CTO says that three people submitted comments on the draft ballot for every blank line in the document; there must be an explanation for that, because those sorts of changes are easy to de-duplicate and cope with.)

There’s still no resolution on how to bind two 20 MHz channels into one 40 MHz channel, something that the chipmakers have been pretending is non-issue from a silicon perspective for some time. That is, that whatever approach is taken, they’ll be able to push out firmware updates that will make their Draft N chips still work.

Meanwhile, we will have another six months, at least, of Draft N gear—and even a second generation of Draft N gear based on the same non-existent standard—before there’s a chance for a real stab at what the final standard will be.

Don’t buy Draft N gear, folks. Buy MIMO.

Posted by Glennf at 8:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2006

Mossberg Sees No Reason to Switch to Draft N

By Glenn Fleishman

It’s the big time as Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal says, “eh,” to Draft N: Mossberg has long favored the Belkin Pre-N router—which I quite liked until mine died—for having excellent coverage compared to plain 802.11g devices. But in his testing of a new Belkin and Linksys using Draft N chips, he found that he “can’t recommend the draft-N equipment over the previous round of MIMO-equipped routers.” He also notes the message I’ve been trying to spread: “manufacturers aren’t promising to upgrade [the routers] to the final N standard when it emerges.” But Mossberg also makes the same proviso that I do: There’s no guarantee that these devices aren’t upgradable to the final standard. There’s just no promise to swap hardware if that’s the only solution.

It seems exceedingly fair of Mossberg to credit slowness in his testing of a Linksys WRT300N to the fiber-optic hookup from Verizon (their FIOS system). Because his Internet feed is unusual, he doesn’t express total confidence that the settings he was required to use to bridge the router to his network were ideal.

Mossberg criticizes the IEEE for delaying the 802.11n standard for so long that the marketplace has released products that are ahead of the process. He blames factionalism in the IEEE for delay, but I would suggest that because the IEEE is composed of firms representing different interests (which he also notes) that it’s more about voting procedures being a problem in the IEEE.

The IEEE counts one person per vote. More well-funded companies can send their employees to the bimonthly meetings that happen around the world (Singapore, Australia, US, Europe, etc.) to retain their voting rights. You have to attend multiple meetings to obtain voting rights and consistently attend thereafter to retain them.

The procedures ensure that companies with more money to spend on voters or that are willing to blow money to skew the process (Freescale) will have disproportionate control or ability to disrupt the process. Freescale ensured that the UWB personal area networking group (802.15.3a) fell apart despite almost total unified opposition from the rest of the industry. In fact, articles suggest now that Freescale UWB’s is delayed until next year and may never ship. So that’s the wages of playing the voting game.

Posted by Glennf at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)

Acer Joins Draft N Devolution

By Glenn Fleishman

Add Acer to the list of companies offering a non-compliant wireless adapter: The Acer Ferrari notebooks will feature Broadcom’s Intensi-fi Draft N chips. As noted many time before: Not a real standard. No guaranteed upgrade. And, to boot, no user-provided way to upgrade an internal card on the unit. Thus, if you want a real Final N product, you may not be able to use this laptop with that standard.

Posted by Glennf at 9:58 AM | Comments (0)