TaskGroupN
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Dell offering draft-802.11n card for notebooks
Like many consumers, Dell is getting a little sick of waiting around for the IEEE's Task Group N to pull it together and roll out a final version of the next-gen WiFi standard, so the company has decided to start offering its own draft-802.11n card in all XPS and select Inspiron laptops. As you're probably already aware, 802.11n will be a wireless networking protocol that uses MIMO technology to offer greater range and speed than traditional 802.11a/b/g networks, but has been famously bogged down by delays and questions of interoperability. Dell's implementation comes in the form of its redundantly-named Wireless 1500 Draft 802.11n dual-band wireless card, which utilizes Broadcom's Intensi-fi flavor of draft-N -- available in such products as Netgear's RangeMax Next lineup -- to provide those desirable performance boosts. Usually we'd recommend that you wait to take the plunge until the dust settles and a final standard is announced, but since that may not happen in our lifetimes and Dell's backwards-compatible card is only $59 (or less, plus the cost of a router), it doesn't sound too risky to give this option a try.[Via Notebook Review]
IEEE source: draft 802.11n timeline slipping yet again
More bad news for MIMO fans (if there is such a thing): Glenn Fleishman over at Wi-Fi Net News is reporting that an IEEE member has informed him of a delay in the timetable for expected approval of the final draft of the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard, from sometime this summer to late fall or even early winter. Fleishman's source claims that Task Group N received around 12,000 comments on the proposed draft -- compared to the 2,000-some that most drafts generate -- which is yet another bad sign following the group's earlier failure to garner even a simple majority in favor of the current proposal, much less the 75% supermajority needed for passage. With draft approval seemingly several months off at the least, it could be a year or even a year and a half before a final 802.11n standard is ratified, meaning that those folks who are already snatching up pre-N gear will have to wait even longer to find out if their hardware ends up being compatible.[Via Ars Technica]
IEEE "Task Group N" rejects first 802.11n draft proposal
In a move that came as little surprise to those who know how these things work, but that will still probably hurt manufacturers who've been releasing MIMO-enabled networking peripherals for the last few months, the IEEE 802.11 working group tasked with creating a next-gen WiFi standard has recently rejected the first draft of the highly-anticipated 802.11n. Not only did the first 802.11n draft fail to capture the 75% supermajority needed for passage, it couldn't even muster a regular majority among "Task Group N," which is a troubling development for those consumers who have already gone out and purchased pre- or draft-N gear from Linksys, Netgear, and the like. As we've reported in the past, some manufacturers had warned -- and independent testing corroborated -- that draft-N gear could negatively effect current 802.11b/g products already on the market, by hogging the available 2.5GHz bandwidth and causing performance issues on existing WLANs. Still, taken in a historical perspective, rejection of the first draft of a proposed 802.11x specification is not uncommon, and actually seems to be the rule, rather than the exception, in the life-cycle of these multi-year, multi-party standards talks.
