Slashdot Mirror
Fast Wi-Fi's Slow Road To Standardization
CWmike contributes this excerpt from Computerworld: "For a technology that's all about being fast, 802.11n Wi-Fi sure took its sweet time to become a standard, writes Steven J. Vaughan Nichols. In fact, until September 2009, it wasn't, officially, even a standard. But that didn't stop vendors from implementing it for several years beforehand, causing confusion and upset when networking gear that used draft standards from different suppliers wouldn't always work at the fastest possible speed when connected. It wasn't supposed to be that way. But, for years, the Wi-Fi hardware big dogs fought over the 802.11n protocol like it was a chew toy. The result: it took five drama-packed years for the standard to come to fruition. The delay was never over the technology. In fact, the technical tricks that give 802.11n its steady connection speeds of 100Mbps to 140Mbps have been well-known for years."
I went through two small companies working on pre-standard N devices. Both went under as a little company you can't pre-run a standard to market. We were ready for production 7 years ago.
So yes, drama that personally affected me as I went through two collapsing companies.
The same thing happened with 802.11g. I remember going through four 802.11g PCI cards before finding one that could communicate with my 802.11g router at a distance of more than three feet. I was not aware that the devices were pre-draft (they didn't state "pre-draft" on the packaging like they do now), so I did not realize that was causing my problem. Eventually the standard was ratified, and if my memory is correct, the manufacturers released firmware updates so that the devices complied with the ratified standard. I doubt that this practice will go away since the manufacturers want to release bleeding-edge technology to stay ahead of the competition, but at least their packaging now states "pre-draft" so that cautious consumers will know to avoid it.