Next-gen Wi-Fi standard showdown

Battle lines are now being drawn over the next-generation WLAN standard, IEEE 802.11n, which promises speeds of 100Mbps and higher, as well as increased range.

Behind a seemingly innocuous announcement last week of a new wireless router from Netgear lies a major WLAN industry schism that pits the likes of Cisco, Intel, and Sony against Nokia, Texas Instruments, and Airgo Networks, the chipmaker for Netgear.

Unfortunately, the real losers in the skirmish could be enterprise customers buying nonstandard implementations of 802.11n under the mistaken belief that they will be interoperable with other products.

Vendors looking to increase ever-eroding margins on commodity 802.11a, b, and g gear have been pushing for higher speeds and a faster ratification of 802.11n. Tired of the wait, Airgo Networks designed its own 802.11n-like chip set to be used first by Netgear in its RangeMax 240 router, announced last week, which has a maximum performance of 240Mbps.

Although it is backward-compatible with 802.11a, b, and g, it is still unclear whether Airgo’s MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) Gen3 chip set will work with the actual 802.11n standard, admitted Dave Borison, director of product management at Airgo.

Meanwhile, a group calling itself the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC), with members such as Atheros, Cisco, Intel, Symbol, and Toshiba, this year began developing its own high-performance standard that it will submit to the IEEE as the 802.11n spec. It is expected that EWC members will manufacture their own products using this spec prior to its ratification.

Although there is no assurance that the EWC spec will become the standard, Bill McFarland, CTO of chipmaker Atheros and key technical lead for the EWC specification, said that products built from the EWC specification will at least be compatible with other EWC members’ products.

There does, however, appear to be some movement toward reconciliation among warring parties. The EWC met last week with some of the IEEE working group companies and, as a result, will resubmit a spec that meets some of their concerns, McFarland said. Nevertheless, there are still holdouts, McFarland admitted.

The splintering among the usually single-minded Wi-Fi industry players has prompted Gartner to warn enterprise customers to wait and see before making any purchasing decisions.

“We have a bunch of vendors dying to make money, but they don’t give a damn what the enterprise is about,” said Ken Dulaney, chief wireless and mobile analyst at Gartner.

Dulaney advises enterprise customers that there is plenty of time to wait for the standard, and that neither Airgo nor a future EWC product is stable or even necessary.