IEEE 802.11n wireless-LAN market remains in conflict as draft-n battle looms
By Maury Wright, Editor in Chief -- EDN, January 18, 2007
Does the IEEE 802.11n wireless-LAN spec even matter? Yes, we could use faster wireless-LAN technology and better range. The speed mainly matters for video delivery, although a higher maximum bandwidth also means that an access point can support more users. In reality, however, the Wi-Fi community has settled into a comfort zone in which 802.11g will be the de facto technology standard for a long time. Backward compatibility with that standard may be more important than "draft compatibility" with the next standard. Nonetheless, chip vendors, including relatively unknown Ralink, have been relentlessly pushing new draft-n chips, and new end products will almost surely have arrived at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show), which took place in mid-January in Las Vegas.
Ralink claims that its new RT2800 chip set will offer the industry's longest range yet. To date, the company has had success primarily in value-priced products as opposed to at the premium end of the price range in which vendors push range and speed advantages. The company can't explicitly describe the design elements that enable the range, so we'll again wait for end products to see how they fare. The company does appear to have a size advantage in that its chip set, with all the necessary antennas for both frequency bands that 802.11n products require, can fit into a typical USB-style Wi-Fi package.
In other recent activity, Metalink revealed the second generation of its WLANPlus family, which also claims draft-n compatibility. Metalink targets consumer-electronics applications with claims that the product can carry HDTV streams. Marvell, meanwhile, announced that Gateway would begin shipping PCs based on the draft-n Marvell TopDog chip.
But does draft-n status carry any credibility? With the 802.11n standard development stretching years beyond what it should have, the Wi-Fi Alliance has announced plans for draft-n compliance testing, but that testing won't start until the second quarter of 2007, when, with any luck, the 2.0 draft of the 802.11n standard will achieve more success at the ballot box. And one company, Airgo Networks, has just announced its fourth-generation MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) chip with the claim of draft 2.0 compatibility, despite the work that the standards body still needs to do.
The bigger news from Airgo, however, is that Qualcomm recently acquired the MIMO pioneer. As noted on a recent EDN blog post, Qualcomm has in the past aggressively protected and profited from its IP (intellectual-property) portfolio, including CDMA (code-division-multiple-access) technology for mobile phones. Airgo's MIMO IP could receive the same attention. At least one other Wi-Fi pundit, Wi-Fi Net News, had the same thought.
