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This weeks news that the Wi-Fi Alliance, the group that certifies wireless products, is taking a strong stand against certifying prestandard 802.11n products comes as no surprise. The groups role in the industry is, after all, to be the watchdog on standards and interoperability. Its logo on a product means the goods have been certified to be interoperable with other products bearing the logo.
But the alliances action should not mean that innovative products that use high-speed MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) technology should—or will—come off the market. MIMO is the scheme at the center of standards proposals now in front of the IEEE and, while the proposals differ on many things, they do agree that MIMO should be part of 802.11n.
802.11n is a new high-speed standard for wireless Ethernet. Our friend Glenn Fleishman at Wi-Fi Networking News uses the best single-phrase description Ive seen to describe it: “Wi-Fis next speed bump.” And it certainly is. 802.11n specifies high-speed throughput of 100 Mbps with backward compatibility to 802.11g. How it delivers that is whats up for debate at the IEEE.
There a number of prestandard products entering the market, all of which are good news to anyone who doesnt have to worry about interoperability later. The home user looking to let the kids download music videos to the family WLAN (wireless LAN) while Mom and Dad chat over a wireless VOIP connection with old classmates who now live on the opposite coast will certainly find it appealing.
But it may be a while before “n” is enterprise material. Adopting prestandard (read: proprietary) technology in an enterprise can be, at best, an expensive misstep and, at worst, a career-killer for the IT manager whos foolhardy enough to do it.
Nevertheless, I would like to see a few more “pre-n” products like the Belkin wireless “pre-n” router that PC Magazine reviewed recently.
All standards begin with proprietary technologies. Some dont make it. Others work their way, in one fashion or another, into standards. And theres nothing wrong with a good old market test to give us an idea of whats ahead, how its going to perform and whether or not we really want it—just as long as we know its proprietary and not interoperable. Thats what weve got the Wi-Fi Alliance to help us with.
So, I say, “Bring em on.” Besides, if you dont, another high-speed baby might just steal the butter from the kitchen. UWB (ultrawideband) seems to be sneaking back in the back door, even if people are no longer buzzing about it with quite the same enthusiasm as they did a year ago.
Next page: The FCC takes a stand.
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: FCC Takes a Stand”> Like 802.11n, UWB is a collection of proposals waiting to become an industry standard. Unlike 802.11n, which enjoys enough commonality among the proposals that its reasonable to think we might actually get a standard, the proposals for UWB are so far apart that they make 802.11ns trek toward IEEE ratification look like a cakewalk.
But just about the time I was ready to assign UWB to the editorial backburner, the Federal Communications Commission intervened. Here comes another austere organization with a weighty acronym to lend an unusual level of credibility to one of the competing UWB schemes.
The FCC issued a finding stating that Freescale Semiconductors Direct Sequence Ultrawide technology did not interfere with other nearby wireless communications. Freescale, as you may recall, is the recent spin-off of Motorolas semiconductor group. Getting FCC validation of a new technology effectively gives the green light to Freescale to start shipping chips—and to OEMs to begin developing products and solutions around them.
The FCCs move raised the question: Does a technology thats not a standard become one ipso facto if it gets the OK, not from the standards-setting organization, but instead from the folks who regulate the airwaves?
Alan Varghese, senior director of semiconductor research at ABI Research, wasnt willing to go so far as to answer “yes” when I called to discuss the FCCs action with him. The word he used for the development was “significant.”
The FCCs action effectively crowned Motorola as the “first mover” in the UWB space, giving it a significant market advantage over its competitors. He postulated, too, that its not beyond the realm of imagination that UWB could trump 802.11 technologies in the high-speed race.
But UWB, you might say (as I did), is a PAN (personal area network) technology. And youd be right. Its more likely to supplant Bluetooth than Wi-Fi, you might say (as I did). Thats where Varghese points out a few stats that could impact the situation. “Going forward,” he says, “the answers are going to become more and more gray.”
He notes that UWB requires less power than Wi-Fi and enjoys an advantage from what he calls “a strategic point of view.”
Varghese comes at the question hot off ABI Researchs release of a new report, “Ultrawideband—Standards, Technology, OEM Strategy and Markets,” which looks at UWBs penetration in the market since February 2002, when the FCC authorized its use in certain frequencies.
As wireless technologies proliferate, Varghese says, the FCC and other national brokers of the airwaves “realize we have limited spectrum or maybe even no spectrum left.” UWB, he notes, “doesnt lock down spectrum. With UWB, you just use the whole spectrum. The beauty is that it co-exists with other uses, so that is the reason the FCC is interested.”
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: UWB as WLAN”> The fact that UWB could be a WLAN technology was demonstrated about this time last year by a company called Pulse-Link out of San Diego that has been developing UWB solutions since the company was founded in 2000.
Just last month, Pulse-Link demonstrated how Direct Sequence UWB and MBOA, the two warring technologies in the UWB standards battle, could be supported on the same chip set. Thus, a break in the logjam that plagues the UWB standards review might not be far away. And even if the logjam continues, the FCCs green light to Freescales Direct Sequence scheme could make the whole standards snarl irrelevant as products based on Freescales chip set find a place in the market.
As Varghese notes, “You can say, This is widely used so, ad hoc, it has become the standard.”
So, what we need now is a nice set of “pre” prototype-type products from both the “n” and the UWB camps to check out the comparative performance of these high-speed network technologies. I still have my money on “n.” It will, after all, be backward-compatible to “g,” and UWB will not. But who can resist a good horse race?
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