802.11n standard to be ratified on its seventh birthday

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802.11n standard to be ratified on its seventh birthday

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 22 July, 2009

There are so many 802.11n fast Wi-Fi products on the market that it is easy to forget that the standard is still a draft. Finally, after no fewer than seven years of in-fighting, the Draft N specification is set to be officially ratified in September.

The 802.11 working group voted on Friday to send Draft 2.0 of the 11n standard on to the upper levels of the IEEE for final review and publication, according to the blog of Matthew Gast, chief strategist at Trapeze Networks and a group member. No further significant changes or delays are expected and the IEEE will vote at its next meeting on September 11 (the same date that the first taskgroup was formed).

The early years of the 11n Task Group, and its predecessor the High Throughput Study Group, set up in 2002, were beset by wrangling and schisms, mainly over exactly how to define and implement the key feature of the 100Mbps-plus standard, MIMO antenna arrays (and channel width was also a bone of contention). In 2006, the fighting reached its peak when the first draft of the standard failed to get the 75% vote required to move to the next stage.

However, once the second draft did get 75% approval in 2007, the Wi-Fi Alliance decided to certify products based on that draft rather than hold up the market further, or increase the proliferation of non-standard and potentially incompatible devices. More than 600 Draft N products have now been kitemarked (once a draft moves to the next stage, major changes are rarely made, so Draft N has been as close to a final platform as possible).

The next 802.11 moves are focused on gigabit WLans with the 11ac and 11ad working groups looking at different approaches including 60GHz technologies.

Vendors continue to bring out 11n products though, regardless of IEEE timescales. A year after it entered the enterprise Wi-Fi market, Ruckus Wireless - best known for its video-over-WLan systems for home media operators - has moved outdoors, announcing an 802.11n access point that carriers can use to offload 3G data traffic from overloaded cellular systems.

The ZoneFlex 7762 access point supports dynamic beamforming and can run in the 5.8GHz and 2.4GHz bands simultaneously. VP of marketing David Callisch said in a statement: "We think there is a huge opportunity in the outdoor market, and it's not like it used to be. People think of metro plays and lighting up cities with a signal. That market is morphing into hotzones - offering Wi-Fi in area-specific markets where there are lots of users such as apartment complexes, city blocks and enterprise campuses."

Also expanding in 802.11n is FON, the Spanish company that has created a global network of 'Fonera' routers, and a business model based on offering free access to customers who will open up their device to others. External hard drives and other USB devices can be connected to the new Fonera 2.0n router, which can run parallel apps and simultaneous uploads and downloads. "By enabling users to handle basic computing tasks from the router instead of the PC, we're taking a small step towards reducing power consumption without limiting functionality," said CEO Martin Varsavsky. "Close your computer, continue uploading and downloading."

FON claims more than 350,000 hotspots globally and more than 1.3m registered users, called Foneros. It has funding from Google, eBay, British Telecom, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital.