Apple Versus Israel: A Cautionary 802.11n Spectrum Tale
One of the more rewarding aspects of my job is the ongoing access it provides me to truly brilliant, visionary and influential members of the tech industry. I was privileged to attend one such meeting last Thursday at NAB, when I shared breakfast with Cees Links, currently the CEO at ZigBee provider GreenPeak Technologies. As EDN’s interview with Links two-plus years ago points out, he was a founding father of what became the family of 802.11 wireless networking standards, beginning at NCR Computers, and sequentially continuing at AT&T, Lucent Technologies, and Agere Systems.
Links confirmed my belief that Apple Computer’s embrace of 802.11 via the Airport brand (albeit with a proprietary twist, thanks to two swapped PCMCIA connector pins) was key to the standard’s eventual success. And in speaking with him, I realized that I also had a connection of sorts with his spouse, who at one point was the product line manager for the Lucent ORiNOCO RG-1000 gateway that, with routing functions disabled and in combination with a PC Card for my laptop, marked my first foray into Wi-Fi and whose SSID lives on in my LAN.
One of the historical anecdotes that Links shared with me dealt with the abundant effort that he and his small team undertook to ensure that the 2.4 GHz frequency band, commonly known as ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) in the United States, would be a worldwide unlicensed standard. Doing so ensured, perhaps obviously, that Lucent and its competitors would be able to sell common silicon (and systems based on it) in all potential markets, differentiated only in some cases by broadcast power limitations. In contrast, Links pointed out, the 5.8 GHz band used by 802.11a and 802.11n is not a worldwide standard, thereby leading the potential for equipment based on it to be prohibited from being used in some geographic regions, due to interference concerns that I’ve been writing about since August of 2002.
Lo and behold, later that very same day, I learned that Israel was in fact seizing incoming Apple iPads at customs for this precise reason. It’s not entirely clear to me why this particular piece of hardware is being ‘picked on’, since dual-band 802.11n-supportive gear has been sold for more than three years already; perhaps the iPad’s instantly recognizable form factor make it a particularly tempting prosecutorial target. And this isn’t the only only Wi-Fi shortcoming that iPad owners and network administrators alike have been struggling with since the tablet’s unveiling. The device seems less adept than other LAN clients at strongly receiving wireless signals, and it also has a hard time reconnecting to access points and routers after it undergoes a sleep-and-reawake sequence.
Apple’s workaround suggestions to date have been weak (and supplemented by questionable end user hacks), and a firmware fix is nowhere in sight. Like some others, I wonder if Apple’s Broadcom silicon selection is at all at the root of this situation, since the 3rd generation Apple iPod touch and the Google Nexus One are similarly equipped and have similar albeit difficult-to-quantify complaints. There are also the classic IT grumbles about incremental bandwidth consumed and generated by the surprisingly (at least to me) popular device, and Princeton University was first to report that it’s inappropriately stubborn in its determination to cling to DHCP IP address assignments beyond a network-defined duration.
My 3G-augmented 16GB iPad (which, truth be told, I selected versus its less expensive Wi-Fi-only counterpart more for its integrated GPS capabilities than its optional cellular data tether) is scheduled to arrive a week from Friday, and I’ll report back any similar or other problems that I discover.
