Tim Higgins
The trickle of news from CES 2007 has started and will soon become a flood. I’ll be in Las Vegas, starting this Saturday, covering the show using a combination of news items, slideshows and articles.
To make it easier for both you and me, I’ll be tagging everything with “CES 2007”, which will appear in the Tag Cloud once I get enough articles posted. In the meantime, you can use this link to bring up a list of the tagged articles.
My previous post describing the D-Link DIR-655 / DWA-652's failure to switch from 40 MHz to 20 MHz channel mode when encountering a legacy WLAN, might be counter to what D-Link says is the expected behavior. But I have found that it is neither a violation of IEEE Draft 2.0 nor the Alliance's Draft 2.0 11n Certification.
Since that post, I've exchanged emails with D-Link and spoken with both Atheros and the Wi-Fi Alliance to try to find out how the D-Link products could not be performing as D-Link had described, yet receive Wi-Fi Draft 2.0 11n Certification.
I share Glenn Fleishman's disappointment with this week's announcement by the Wi-Fi Alliance that they have only begun their certification testing. But judging from what I've seen so far, getting draft 11n gear up to spec is going to be a long, difficult process.
I spent a few days last week testing a D-Link DIR-655 router and DWA-652 Cardbus card, which are based on Atheros XSPAN silicon. These are the first products to have firmware and drivers posted that allegedly implement 11n Draft 2.0 compliance. My primary focus was to see whether the legacy protection mechanisms added in 802.11n Draft 2.0 were working in actual product.
Tuesday's entry by Intel into the draft 11n market was a bit of a surprise, given its history with being late to the party with previous wireless LAN product generations. But the 11n train left the station awhile ago and Intel, like any other company wanting to stay in the WLAN game, had to get on board, draft status or not.
But aside from lending legitamacy to a technology that has so far been most notable for further decreasing the chance of an average consumer having a successful wireless networking experience, and for getting reviewers' and pundits' shorts in a knot (myself included), Intel did something else. Something that, in my opinion, they didn't play up enough in their announcement material or webcast / conference call, and that deserves special mention.
