We know you've been waiting on pins and needles to hear who got firsties on draft 2.0 802.11n certification from Wi-Fi Alliance -- we sure have. It looks like D-Link is the lucky winner, with its D-Link Xtreme N Router and Xtreme N Notebook Adapter the first products to receive the new badge. That means the two devices will be sporting a new "distinctive and prestigious logo," while D-Link can start boasting of the highest level of forwards compatibility in the wild west of 802.11n products. This doesn't begin to spell doom for draft 1.0 users, but it's always good to see things settle down a bit in that space while we wait another few decades for the spec to finalize.

In a move meant to ensure compatibility across vendors, the Wi-Fi Alliance has started interoperability testing of 802.11n Draft 2.0 products. That means "WiFi Certified" products should hit for retail before summer is out. Besides sporting that swank new logo, the certification should provide some peace of mind related to WPA2 security, WMM QoS for video streaming, and compatibility with legacy 802.11a/b/g regardless of the manufacturer. While cross-platform certification testing of a draft spec is unusual and likely won't guarantee 100% compatibility, it's still a welcome step by the industry given the troubled history of interconnecting disparate 802.11 draft devices in the past. Besides, with the final IEEE spec (already two and half years in the making) not expected until September 2008, what else could Apple, Dell, Sony, Nokia, Cisco and the other 250 or so members do in the face of such mucho demand?

Last fall, NEC took its WARPSTAR lineup into the realm of draft-N with the Aterm WR8200N, and thanks to all this Draft 2.0 hubbub that's going around, apparently it figured now would be a good time to hop on the next bandwagon. The Aterm WR8400N four-port router and Aterm WL300NC PCMCIA card both tout theoretical transfer rates of around 300Mbps, are backwards compatible with 802.11a/b/g devices, support "Multi SSID" / WEP / WAP protocols, and can automatically detect and connect to signals in both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. No word just yet on price nor availability, but we're sure it'll get lost in the crowd of similar alternatives before too long anyway.

[Via Impress]

It's been a long, hard road for all of us -- consumers, manufacturers, developers, and a little club called the 802.11n Working Group -- but the next-gen, MIMO-powered WiFi standard has finally reached an important milestone in its tortured journey from a wee pre-N to a full-fledged spec (hopefully!), with 83.4% of eligible voters approving the latest Draft 2.0 revision. As we all remember from the overwhelming initial rejection of Draft 1.0, a 75% supermajority is required for moving on to the next stage, so the fact that there was this much support coupled with relatively few comments (3,000-some versus the 12,000+ for that famous Draft 1.0 flameout) means that we may actually be on track for a planned April 2009 publication of the final IEEE spec. The best part is that since Draft 2.0 is guaranteed to be fully compatible with the finalized 802.11n, your current gear with the D 2.0 badge of honor will definitely play nice with future components. So we're in the home stretch now, folks -- all that's left is some nitpicking over technicalities and language -- and it looks like the naysayers will have been proven wrong after all; although when WiMax comes to town and makes WLANs irrelevant, there's a good chance that this whole ordeal will be quickly forgotten anyway.

[Via Ars Technica]

We hope your 802.11a/b/g setup is doing alright, because it looks like the finalized specifications for the next leap forward in WiFi has taken yet another step back. While we've all been waiting (and waiting) for some good news to surface about the progression of 802.11n, it appears that bad news just follows the next-generation WiFi standard around like a shadow. Despite the fact that Draft 1.0 has already been implemented in a plethora of products, including Dell's own 802.11n card for notebooks, reports are pointing to January 2007 before we even see a vote on the second draft of the specification. This issue is getting critical as vendors have jumped all over preliminary specs in order to grab sales by touting "802.11n compliancy," but a mishmash of implementations that don't always play nice together, as well as the questionable ability of Draft 1.0 products to be upgraded to Draft 2.0 (not to mention the final 802.11n draft) with a simple firmware update, is paving a trail of incompatibility and confusion. Ideally, the IEEE captains who are steering this ship can get things on track for an early '07 approval, but even if this does go down, we supposedly won't see final (as in, the really-real-final) specifications until sometime in 2008. While achieving speeds of near 600Mbps sounds mighty tempting, you'd probably be better off avoiding any device that promises to deliver such performance until this decision-making bottleneck clears up -- unless, of course, you just like playing the odds.

[Via Ars Technica]