Just before Monday broke here on the East coast, Qualcomm (which minutes later announced that it was acquiring Airgo) "announced the availability of the world's first chipset offering full support for Draft 2.0 of the IEEE 802.11n standard". As Glenn Fleishman points out in his post, since Draft 2.0 won't be voted on until March of next year, this announcement is pitching a chipset that is based upon a "draft of a draft".

We all knew that at some point Airgo would come off its mountain and wallow in the pre-standard mud along with Broadcom, Atheros and Marvell. So I guess if you're going to get dirty, you might as well set a new standard. Congratulations to both Airgo and its proud new owner Qualcomm for establishing a new low in WLAN marketing practices.

Updated 12/4/06 12:45PM EST A little research and a call with Greg Raleigh, President & CEO of Airgo Networks clarified what Qualcomm / Airgo is actually announcing. The most recent accepted 802.11n draft is 1.06 and the current working version is 1.07. Raleigh said that it is "pretty clear" what will be in 802.11n Draft 2.0 and that most recent activity in the working group has been taking things out of the draft rather then adding them.

Raleigh also said the ad-hoc group formed back in March and chaired by Cisco and Motorola to hammer out a solution to the 40 MHz mode problem (that causes current draft 11n devices to interfere with 802.11b/g WLANs) has presented all of its options, but that consensus has not yet been reached.

So in order to not miss the Wi-Fi interoperability certification activities announced in August that will take place in the March-June 2007 timeframe, Airgo decided to put everything that could possibly be in Draft 2.0 into the AGN400 chipset that was announced today and start baking silicon. But "everything that could possibly be in 802.11n Draft 2.0 compliant" isn't very catchy—hence the abbreviation to just "802.11n Draft 2.0" (my conclusion, not Raleigh's words).

Qualcomm announced now because it is actually shipping product. But expect a rash of "Draft 2.0" chipset announcements shortly, with consumer end-product announcements from the usual suspects to follow in time for next month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

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