Profiting on Wi-Fi’s Future Today

I was expecting the jump to IEEE standard-based 100-Mbps Wi-Fi, 802.11n, to take years.

I was wrong.

Now, it appears that on Thursday, the TGn Sync crew of Atheros, Intel, Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, et. al. has won out over the WWiSE gang of Airgo Networks, Broadcom, Conexant, Motorola, Nokia and Texas Instruments.

The 802.11n committee itself hadn’t expected to move this quickly. Personally, I wouldn’t have been surprised if official 802.11n hadn’t arrived until 2008.

I was being cynical about its chances for a speedy adoption because I remember all too well the bitter fights between Intersil and its supporters and TI (Texas Instruments) with its allies over the 802.11g standard.

For those who had to live through them, the fights over Intersil’s CCK/OFDM (Complementary Code Keying/Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) or TI’s PBCC (Packet Binary Convolutional Coding) were long and painful.

I would say that these battles delayed real 802.11g deployments by at least a year and a half.

I didn’t see any reason to think why we wouldn’t see a similarly prolonged fight in the differing views on how to handle MIMO (multiple-in, multiple-out).

TGn Sync is to provide seamless interoperability with the earlier 802.11a, b and g standards.

At the same time, TGn Sync will up wireless networking speeds first up to the 100M-bps range and then pushing it up first to 315M bps and eventually shoving it all the way up to 630M bps.

I’ll believe that last when I see it streaming over my network.

But, even so, anything that will give me Fast Ethernet speeds over the air is a good thing in my book.

Yes, you can do that kind of thing now with bonding channels together in some proprietary fast 802.11g solutions, but that approach eats up spectrum.

No, give me speed and standards anytime.

What that means for us in the trenches of deploying this stuff is that we can deploy TGn Sync pre-801.22n-based equipment and not worry about having to replace it in a year.

Faster, standard-based Wi-Fi without requiring customers to upgrade before they’re ready: I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a perfect fit for the customers I know.