Fleishman reports on Draft 11n issues

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Tim Higgins

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Glenn Fleishman has a long piece over at Wi-Fi Networking News that expands on some of the issues I covered in my post of a few weeks ago. It also provides some new insight into some of the issues regarding 11n and its operation in the 5 GHz band.

Glenn gives props to Apple for its decision to not allow use of “wide channels”, i.e. channel bonding or 40 MHz mode, in the 2.4 GHz band. It should also be noted, however, that Intel has done the same thing in its new draft 11n chipset. Buffalo Technology didn’t go quite as far with its new dual-band gear, choosing only to default to 20 MHz mode in the 2.4 GHz band. It’s still possible for a user to manually switch the Buffalo gear to channel-bonding mode, however.

Tim Higgins

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Wideband WLANs on the way?

The final standard is still over a year in the future and the Wi-Fi certification process for draft 11n products is about 3-5 months away. But companies are continuing to put this Beta-test-in-progress (which you, the consumer, are paying to participate in) into end-products beyond wireless routers and adapters. We've already seen draft 11n integrated into notebooks, and now Apple and D-Link have integrated it into networked media players.

The AppleTV announcement revealed that draft 11n capable hardware (from Atheros, it turns out) had already been integrated into existing Core 2 Duo MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Core 2 Duo iMacs (except the 17-inch, 1.83GHz iMac). All you need to do is run an "enabler" app, buy a new version of the Airport Extreme (in new Mac mini form factor) and voila, you have an interference generator for your 11b/g network. But something that Apple has done right is to put concurrent (or simultaneous) dual-band capability into its draft 11n products. This raises the cost, but also the flexibility since connections in both bands can be made at the same time.

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Our 11n reviews resume

With the Wi-Fi Draft 11n certification process underway, I've decided its time to resume reviews of these products. This doesn't mean that I now consider the products to be "done"; far from it. But with the legitimacy of the Wi-Fi mark now being slapped on boxes, I figure someone has to see if these products are really living up to their claims.

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