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The latest IEEE standards committee meeting might have been good for Cairns tourism, but it did little to progress the fortunes of a standards process that is at risk of becoming irrelevant.
With only two real competitors left in the race for standards supremacy it seems improbably that the process could drag on even longer, but that’s the latest prediction for a resolution after the Cairns meeting failed to reach anything close to an agreement on the technology direction.
The 802.11n standards battle is being fought out between two remaining competitors, the World Wide Spectrum Efficiency (WWiSE) consortium and TGn Sync. Each has its own backers, each has a slightly different approach to the 100Mbps plus speed target, but there are enough similarities that there is talk (and no real choice) for the two camps to reach a compromise agreement.
The sparks flew in Cairns as backers of the TGn Sync proposal, which had 56 per cent of the vote at the last standards meeting, tried to move a resolution to adjourn the meeting and not hold a vote because they could see they were going to lose. The TGn group could see they would suffer a humiliating defeat after being so close to success as rival, WWiSE, recruited new votes against it.
The TGn group failed to get an adjournment, the vote was taken and nothing was achieved when TGn Sync attracted only 49 percent of the vote.
It’s now back to the drawing board for both camps to try to come to some agreement that will be able to muster the 75 percent majority required to vanquish. It seems likely only a compromise technology will be able to get the numbers.
In the WWiSE camp you have company’s like Texas Instruments, Motorola, Broadcom and Hughes, Airgo Networks, and Nokia, while in the TGn Sync camp the backers include Intel, Nortel and Sony, Atheros, Agere, Intel and Qualcomm, Nortel, Samsung, Philips and Panasonic.
The group’s similarities include multiple in, multiple out (MIMO) antenna technology, but they use different channel widths and different parts of the spectrum. The TGn Sync wants 40MHz channel widths and two antennas, while WWiSE is proposing smaller 20MHz channels but more antennas.
TGn also uses the 5GHz spectrum instead of the 2.4GHz band where WWISE operates. The TGn Sync group believes its technology will be capable of achieving data rtes of up to 315 Mbps, but the WWiSE strategy will be more easily accepted in Europe and Japan where it more closely conforms to spectrum legislation.
In theory, this means the standards process is now back to square one, with all options now eliminated as possible standards. In effect it means both of the two remaining proposals must be reconsidered with the only likely outcome a compromise. The deadline for compromise is July, when the next meeting of the 802.11 Working Group and the 11n Task Group will meet in San Francisco, though the best the world can hope for is that the standard will finally be ratified in 2006, with products released to market in late 2006 or early 2007. World Wide Spectrum Efficiency (WWiSE)
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