You would think from Atheros' statement released today announcing the approval of 802.11n draft 1.10 that it's all over except for the sound of champagne corks popping in terms of having 802.11n products that consumers can buy without fear.

But it is not.

Yes, today's vote is good news since it advances the ball toward the end goal, which is still over a year away. But if you already own draft 11n gear, you should not assume that it is only a few firmware and driver upgrades away from being equivalent to products that will roll off the production lines over the coming months. And the same goes for gear currently sitting on the shelf at your favorite retailer.

Chipmakers have been using the past six months or so to quietly spin new versions of draft 11n chips. I suspect some of these rev'd chips have quietly moved into the products without fanfare. Updated designs also appear in the form of dual-band products introduced at and around the Consumer Electronics Show. And I suspect other changes are still to come, especially if the industry decides to mode toward "wideband" WLANs.

As evidence of the need for consumers to still keep their wits about them, two of the "implications" listed in Atheros' release deserve special note:

Draft 1.0 proved to be quite stable as the key technical differences between version 1.10 and 1.0 are limited to protection mechanisms for legacy devices during the operation of 40 MHz in the 2.4 band.

This makes it sound like the "protection mechanisms" are some minor issue, interesting only to wireless propeller-heads. But this is the key issue of whether to allow 11n products to be "bad neighbors" to existing 802.11b and g products. And note that Atheros doesn't even say whether this key issue has been resolved in 1.10 and, if so, how!

Atheros' current draft 1.0 802.11n XSPAN(TM) chips comply with the draft 1.10 specification and will require only a software update to bring legacy devices into official compliance with the anticipated final draft.

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but the "current" in the second bullet smells a bit wiggly. So I've asked Atheros to clarify whether all draft 11n products using its XSPAN chipsets that have been shipped to date are "current".

Perhaps Glenn Fleishman has better sources than I, but I think it's waay too early to issue the "all clear" for buying draft 11n products.

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