On The Verge

I’ve heard some technology executives make some pretty strange and entertaining statements over the years. But Alereon CEO Eric Broockman really has me wondering if he’s actually serious with a recent blog post. In “A rose by any other name… Whatever… Or my frustration with wireless product reviews,” Broockman chastises members of the press for testing Wireless USB products based on the specs that remember were defined by Alereon and the other Wireless USB players. No member of the press has had anything to do with the specmanship of the wireless industry. It’s purely the industry players like Alereon that want to boast of fast data-transfer rates and hot applications such as wireless video delivery.

But now that products clearly don’t deliver on the promised specs, Broockman wants the press to test the products in more realistic uses. Broockman even suggests that the press should have learned from the past that wireless products don’t deliver to the specs. Now who is at fault here? I’d say the marketing executives in wireless companies – whether 802.11, Wireless USB, 3G, and others -- need to learn from the past and generate reasonable specs. Why is it that 1-Gbit/sec Ethernet will at least momentarily hit that theoretical maximum rate whereas the same is never true of wireless products?

Broockman failed to link to any of the “offending” reviews. I found little out there actually. This PC World article is so brief that it’s almost useless and it improperly compares a true Wireless USB hub with a hub that uses 802.11 to extend range. Here’s a more comprehensive review of a Belkin hub from Notebookreview.com that does note data rate limitations.