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The End Of Open WLAN Standards |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Thursday, 17 August 2006 |
How long can the end user community wait for a next
generation Wi-Fi standard? The answer is that they can't and won't.
The latest news from the IEEE 802.11n WLAN standards committee
must be something of a death knell for a standards process almost totally
corrupted by strategic corporate upmanship and greed.
Sounds excessive? Just look at Rambus in the memory market
if you think corporate greed can't corrupt a standards process.
News emerged this week that a slew of some 12,000 documents
have dragged down the 802.11n standards process once again. That's 12,000
responses to the Draft 1.0 issued earlier this year.
The result is an increasingly lengthy standards setting
process that has all but been abandoned by end users who have already started a
migration to non-standards-based product bought to market on the strength of
the first draft.
In the meantime, the second 802.11n draft will be lucky to reach
a vote in January next year, with proper standards-based 802.11n product potentially
a year after that.
While half of the 12k amendments were little more than
editorial nit-picking and have already been resolved, that still leaves another
6,000 or so that are a serious threat to the ratification of the first Draft in
anything like its current form.
According to reports, no less than three people filed
comments which pointed out every single blank line in the document. Well that's
pretty easy to deal with, but when they add up to 12,000 a editorial logistics
alone must be daunting.
Dealing with the sheer volume of responses has pushed a
second draft back from the September meeting to the November meeting, setting
the stage for a January vote.
But even if that second Draft reached a 75 per cent
acceptance rate, the final ratification might take another year! Please?
Another year and a half from now!
That's on the outside chance that the IEEE can get a second
draft up by November for a January vote and that that vote is passed. Umm, only
if they are able to resolve the issues in the 6000 or so documents that weren't
trivial ones about typos and white space.
Issues like deciding between three proposed methods for
combining two 20MHz channels into one 40MHz channel.
The poor interoperability reportedly evident between the
Draft n product already on the market clearly demonstrates that agreement must
be reached, but at what cost?
Nobody knows the cost yet, because the industry has steamed
ahead without the standard. Chip fabs are pumping out Draft n chipsets,
networking vendors are selling Draft n devices and OEM PC manufacturers are planning
to put Draft n interfaces in their computers before the end of the year - well ahead
of a second draft, let alone a second draft vote.
In-Stat estimates that some 300 thousand Draft n devices are
already in the market and that is only from Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, Buffalo and Belkin.
In a masterful understatement In-Stat "expects the
transition to 802.11n will be bumpier than that from 802.11b to 802.11g".
Broadcom has already shipped more than a million
Draft n chipsets. Airgo, Atheros, Marvell and even Intel are all full steam ahead
with Draft n, no doubt because it commands a far higher margin that 802.11g
chips.
Intel, according to In-Stat plans to release its Kedron
802.11n wireless module within its Santa Rosa mobile platform in early 2007,
even though the standard will not be ratified by then.
Okay, so the 802.11n chipsets only account for 3.6 percent
of total WLAN chipset shipments this year, according to In-Stat estimates. But that
number is expected to grow to 20 per cent next year and none of it will be
standards-based.
The situation has become untenable. That means one in five wireless
devices sold next year are not standards compliant. So what is the
point of having a standard?
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