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802.11n Should Be Finalized By September
adeelarshad82 writes "It's probable that the 802.11n standard will finally be approved at a scheduled IEEE meeting this September, ending a contentious round of infighting that has delayed the standard for years. For the 802.11n standard, progress has been agonizingly slow, dating back almost five years to 2004, when 802.11g held sway. It struggled throughout 2005 and 2006, when members supposedly settled on the TGnSync standard, then formed the Enhanced Wireless Consortium in 2006 to speed the process along. A draft version of 802.11n was approved in January 2006, prompting the first wave of routers based on the so-called draft-n standard shortly thereafter."
Will the final version be (backwards?) compatible with Draft-N routers and wireless cards?
call me FOSS im the boss with the sauce and the source
Any bets on how many "Draft N" products will play nice with "N" products? (and, in that vein, any boneheaded misfeatures going into "N" because Vendor X sold 15 million "draft N" chips that were a little undercooked?)
I suspect a lot of companies are gun shy about "rushing" into any standards after the sphincter-busting tactics of Rambus in the JEDEC memory standards fiasco.
My computers can't even saturate 802.11g.
Seriously. I don't remember how long it took but it always seemed like a/b/g came along fairly quickly. Then n was rumored for a while, then it was finally "drafted" and I got all excited and figured it was only 6 months or a year from being final.... not so much. Here we are 3 and a half years later and I still haven't bothered to buy something based on n because I've been burned too many times by things that don't quite meet the official spec.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Just think... all these vendors have probably discontinued quite a few of those models based on the draft N spec (at least those routers from late 2006 on)... I know Buffalo Tech has discontinued the infiniti N router of mine.
Since 2004.
Trouble is, with something like Wifi, where much of the value lies in ubiquity and interoperability, there really isn't a "forward" to move toward without a standard(official, informal consensus, or de-facto standard + clones).
Oh goody. Now I can get dropped connections from twice the distance!
Right after Duke Nukem Forever is released.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
now i can finally use the technology that i've been using for the past 3 years!
What does one nefarious company involved with a separate standards organization have to do with any other company involved with any other standards organization? Please forgive me if this was the appropriate place to rant about Rambus, Inc.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
802.11n SHOULD HAVE BEEN finalized over a year ago.
Jeez did someone get a little trigger happy with the troll mod in this thread?
Now maybe some networking companies can start releasing wireless N products.
On another note, imagine how much the nerd herd is going to have to work to sell a netowrk product now.
Chuck: "OK, you can get this router which is a draft N, but this new N product will do everything the draft N product does for 20$ more"
Client: "All these letters confuse me and make me belligerent. Can't we only use one letter? "
Chuck: "Ok, howabout N?"
Client: "Why not something simpler, like A, A is the best you know."
Chuck: "Just give me 150$ for the router a 75$ for an extended warranty."
Client: "Here you go, I am easily parted from my money."
to Wyfy
I don't know why you were modded -1, Troll; in the time between the 802.11n standard being worked on and then being finalized, we've had a war end and subsequently being again, a presidential election, numerous state elections, several revisions of Windows 7, two new Ubuntu releases, Duke Nukem Forever was finally canceled, speculative trading of oil causing major financial headaches for the American SUV market, and the banking and housing market bubbles finally popped.
In fact, California and New York may actually work faster than the 802.11n standards consortium. +5, Insightful, imo.
Perhaps you should go back and revise, I think you missed a "T".
Perhaps the poster's point was that given the litigious nature of some of the participants in various standards setting organizations, it's not a stretch to imagine that every dotted i and every crossed t is checked a bazillion times to limit a repeat of this type of gotcha in the future.
Full disclosure: I'm not a member of either standards committee. :P
once again steering the fail-boat that engineering is driving, until she wraps around a phone pole, hits a standard, and kills a company or two.
"draft" N is exactly why i make sure marketing does not get to see developer mailing lists and content at my slave site. why in the holy hell SHOULD the production standard be compatible, or even remotely similar to, its draft??
Good people go to bed earlier.
IPv6 will be adopted by the masses?
Don't worry, as soon as 802.11n is finalized, technology will have progressed to 802.11o so we'll have to wait another 3 years until that is finalized. At which point, we'll have 802.11p. :)
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
....that will be immediately supplanted by yet another 'standard,' once again brought to you by the moronic greed-heads who couldn't come to an agreement in time to get 802.11n out the door before it was already obsolescent.
Regards;
...and Duke Nukem Forever was non-cancelled...
I have a copy of one of the draft PCI specifications. In big bold letters it tells the reader to "NOT DESIGN PRODUCTS BASED ON THIS DRAFT STANDARD." Because the very definition of "draft" means that it's not complete and it's likely that the final specification will deviate from the draft in some ways.
I suppose the standards folks have no real way of enforcing that edict (an aside: the USB Implementers group are particularly toothless), but still -- anyone who buys a product based on a draft spec should not be surprised when it doesn't work with products built to the released spec.
Does this mean that CSIRO finally signed the Letter of Assurance that IEEE has been asking for?
End of line..
I heard DNF would be released soon, too.
Am I the only one to notice that draft n wireless results in audio static? Any computer with a wireless N card built in or a secondary PCI card will cause blips and random static to come from your speakers. How has this not been resolved? This standard should not be approved until they make it reliable.
You haven't missed out on much.
I did try to go the N-route, until I discovered that different devices operate on differetn frequencies. Buying teo draft-N certified products I thought I had a good chance of them working together.
Turns out one was for 2.4GHz band and the other for the 5GHz band.
Both were certified and one of them metioned nothing of frequencies outside the box.
If the standard actually allows this, I don't know. Beware...
The final version of the spec will be called "802.11n Forever"