RSSDraft 802.11n Wireless Standard Passed
By Ed Oswald | Published January 20, 2006, 12:50 PM
The IEEE on Thursday approved the first draft of a proposal for the 802.11n wireless standard at a meeting in Hawaii. Last week, the group set aside the last of their differences, adopting a proposal put forth by the Enhanced Wireless Consortium, a interest group headed by Atheros, Broadcom and Intel.
While it is not final just yet, chipmakers will likely begin to rush out chipsets compatible with the soon-to-be standard. However, the IEEE warns that until 802.11n is finalized, the products carry no guarantee of interoperability.
Broadcom and Marvell have already announced chips based on the draft, with Broadcom saying its products would be upgradeable in case of any changes in the final revision. The first 802.11n chips could be released by the end of this quarter, Marvell said.
Passage of a proposal requires a 75 percent vote in the affirmative, which it easily surpassed on a vote of 184 to 0 with four abstentions. However, final ratification is not expected until 2007.
802.11n uses a technology called MIMO, which stands for multiple-in, multiple out. In layman's terms, it means a device could have multiple antennas that handle more than one data stream at a time, thus speeding the transfer of data tremendously.
According to test, data rates of up to 600 MBps could be expected. 802.11n devices would also be backwards compatible with the earlier 802.11a, b and g specifications.
"This past October Atheros set out with the Enhanced Wireless Consortium to break the 802.11n stalemate and accelerate a draft that defines significantly higher wireless LAN performance," Atheros president and CEO Craig Baratt said in a statement.
"We have achieved this objective and are confident that our customers can now manufacture products with unprecedented performance based on our technologies that conform to this new draft."
Is this the wireless tech that finally won't suck?
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|And they just had to hold the meeting in Hawaii.
All-expenses-paid for everyone of course.
My global meetings are held in our crummy video conferencing room :-(
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|Ladies and Gentlement. I present to you Wireless Technology with the speed and capability of wired!
Alright with that out of the way, any of you know since this Dual-Antenna deal will prevent Wireless Spiking? I don't know if any of you have tried gaming on wireless but you spike about every 10 seconds.
I'm just wondering now if we have two antennas, will this help prevent the slack? or will we still spike worse than an electrical storm?
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|Online storage may actually become a viable business option if this takes off. Why would you want to lug around a hefty device with onboard storage when you could access over the air from almost anywhere? The back-up/fault-tolerance aspects would also be better. ISP's and web hosting ISVs will jump on that. Google already gives you a taste with the Gmail storage utility. You'll just pay to have a huge storage host and carry around a lightweight WiMax device to access it all with your other real-time content. I can't wait!
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|Waiting on this & Wimax-- great test of it at the next Olympics. Would likely mean that terabyte hard disks & dvds won't suffice then. PCI bus won't suffice either: enter Stage left(drum roll please) Sun's grid array technology, w/ Niagara and/or Cell processors hopefully also.
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|The story was mistated by C/net, there is an updated version here
Read the updated story here
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|Yes, it's a typo. The last proposals I saw were saying it could do 300Mbps, possibly more. I doubt they got a 20x increase since then, but 600Mbps in a test environment is plausable.
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|Is that speed actually right? 600MBps = 4.8Gbps is almost five times faster than gigabit ethernet! If it is true that is amazing, though my guess is that that is a typo and it should actually say 600Mbps, which is still very fast.
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|No, that's a typo. It's 600Mbps but don't expect those speeds anyway.
And it won't be finalized for another year.
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|woohoo!
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