On Tuesday, May 2, the IEEE 802.11n Working Group voted and rejected the IEEE 802.11n draft as its final version. Split by strong factions, draft supporters within the group could not garner the necessary 75% vote to swing the draft their way.

Article Tools

• 

As a result, many industry observers are warning that the eventual final version may be sufficiently different in scope to cause the obsolescence of early market 11n products.

Some large industry players claim that it is highly unlikely that there will be sufficient change to the final version to rock the industry--sighting that any such changes would have to be approved by a 75% vote.

It is now expected that it will be some time in 2007 before the final version of the hard-fought 11n standard is ratified. In the mean time, manufacturers are pressing ahead with pre-11n products of various extrapolations, mostly based on the existing 11n draft.

By the time the standard is fully ratified, the market will be flooded with pre-11n products of various camps--many of which will not interoperate well or at all. The market itself will have to decide which extrapolations will prevail.

It sounds like the UWB wars all over again. When the standards process is significantly delayed, markets don’t wait. Manufacturers cannot afford to wait when competitors are not waiting. The risk of non-interoperability of future finalized standard-based products with legacy pre-11n products is fully recognized. If that happens, many manufacturers will simply retool and market their finalized 11n products as ‘the next generation.’

But there is more to the story. IEEE 802.11n is complex with many provisions for product customization for market specialization. The common core elements of the spec, or least common denominator for interoperability, will not offer the performance that is required, or that is possible, with customization--i.e., variants of diversity reception and beam forming.

Customization for optimization will cause application-based product selectivity in which products compete based on performance. In this environment, there may be little incentive or reason to participate in multivendor interoperability through a finalized standard. As an example, home multistream HD video distribution will require the highest bit rate along with the best quality of service techniques. Manufacturers will try to outdo each other with all of the MIMO innovation they can muster, including more than just two antennas, smarter beam forming and various digital signal-processing schemes to obtain as much signal gain as possible.

So, perhaps the battle over the 11n standard is nearly a mute point. Base 11n compliance may turn out to be less important to the customer than the actual performance of the product. It makes sense that savvy customers will choose performance over pedigree--maybe that’s why Tuesday’s vote failed. It’s really a race for performance more than interoperability.

Stay connected!