About 802.11n

After many years of discussion and debate, the 802.11n standard still awaits final approval. What is going on and why is ratification taking so long? At the time of writing, retailers and e-tailers are chock-full of wireless networking equipment, much of it boasting some claim to 802.11n standard performance.

About 802.11n
At the time of writing, retailers and e-tailers are chock-full of wireless networking equipment, much of it boasting some claim to 802.11n standard performance.

However, there is right now, not a single officially-ratified 802.11n wireless networking product available on the market. The reason? Many years after it was first mooted, the standard still has not been formally approved by the body that conceived it.

IEEE
The labyrinthine path that such ratification requires leads back to a body called the IEEE Standards Association. You probably recognise the acronym - standing for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - as it's already been behind the likes of IEEE 1394 (more commonly known as FireWire) and Bluetooth. In fact, dig into the history of the organisation, and you'll even find the standard for the trusty old parallel port in there.

IEEE has over 350,000 members, and undoubtedly its work has helped standardise much underlying technology that we rely on today. Simply, it's hard to come up with any kind of hardware standard without involving IEEE somewhere along the path. But perhaps its most prominent, and frustrating, standard thus far has been 802.11, and its variants.

Originally ratified in 1997, the 802.11 standard defines the wireless protocols that sit at the heart of the routers and adapters that are in widespread use today. Furthermore, as technology has evolved, the standards have moved on. 802.11a was released in October 1999, running at an operational frequency of 5GHz, but with comparably limited range. 802.11b, released at the same time, works at a frequency of 2.4GHz, and it was a trade off between greater range and interference problems (given the popularity of the 2.4GHz frequency among many household devices). It was the latter that first started the mainstream surge in popularity for wireless networking equipment.

It then took four years for the 802.11g standard to be approved, and it proved to be just in the nick of the time. Faster, and with a suitable range courtesy of the decision to go with the 2.4GHz frequency again, the truth is that 802.11g has proven appropriate for most home and very small office environments. It easily shunts broadband internet around, although data intensive applications running across a network can struggle with the speed limitations, as many corporate users who were quick to jump aboard 802.11g found to their cost. But still, many businesses are still happily using 802.11g standard equipment.

However, the seeds for the current problem were sown with the introduction of the 'g' standard. The limited speed of 802.11b wireless technology - with a maximum data rate of 11Mbit/sec - was proving to be quite a ceiling by the end of 2002, and many manufacturers were keen to offer quicker products. As a result, even before the standard was officially ratified, a series of draft-g wireless products hit the market, based on informed guesses of the shape of the final standard. This was less than a year before the formal standard was approved (and so the technology was mainly in place), and inevitably there were fears of incompatibilities as a result (some of which were realised when draft products failed to interoperate fully with officially ratified hardware). In June 2003, 802.11g was finally ratified, with maximum data rates of 54Mbit/sec, and this meant that the while there was a small vacuum between the launch of draft and official 'g' equipment, it proved to be a small blip in the uptake of wireless networking equipment.

The N Factor
Yet earlier problems were nothing compared to the situation that the marketplace was facing next, as the IEEE's wireless working group pressed on with its plans for the next generation of technology.

In principle, the proposals for 802.11n seem both logical and thought-through. By adding multiple antennae for receiving and sending, and a wider 40MHz bandwidth channel, the 802.11n standard in principle offers both faster speeds and a broader range. It works across the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency ranges, and was first put forward by IEEE's working group in 2003 as the next step up from 802.11g. And yet, for the past five years and counting, it's been deliberating over the standard, and has yet to ratify it, amid talk of divisions among its members, which have slowed the process down even more than usual. After all, the vast membership of IEEE makes consensus difficult at the best of times, and achieving the 75 per cent of member votes required to even formalise a draft of a standard is no plain sailing.

At the time of writing, the much-delayed final decision has been moved several times. Back at the start of 2007, IT PRO reported that a further draft specification had been adopted, but that the final approval would still not follow until eighteen months down the line. Now, many believe that we'll be lucky to see a formal ratification before the end of the year, with a 2009 date being widely discussed.

Relevance
But is IEEE ratification even relevant now? Or has the time that the organisation has taken to complete the process left it on the sidelines anyway where draft-n networking equipment is concerned? Certainly, tens of millions of draft-n standard wireless products have already been sold, and the irony for a non-ratified standard is that there's already a lot of maturity in the equipment on the market. Much of that is down to other companies and bodies taking matters into their own hands, and working hard on interoperability.

It was predictable that the big manufacturers of wireless equipment wouldn't hang around to witness a lengthy ratification programme, as the clues were there with the early 'g' standard equipment. In this case, you can't help but feel that those manufacturers made the right call, with draft-n products having been available for a couple of years already, and selling exceptionally well to a seemingly satisfied customer base.

What's more, as draft 2.0 of the 802.11n specification has now been approved by the 802.11 Working Group, the technology itself is all but locked, and has been for the past year at least. Save for a dramatic turn in the process which is highly unlikely now, manufacturers know what the final shape of the 802.11n standard is going to be. The ratification process is very much in the final stages now, to the relief of many.

Corporate customers in particular will be pleased when it's signed off. Many enterprises have been reluctant to commit to the 802.11n standard in any kind of draft form, needing the peace of mind of ratification before they look to commit significant resources to any kind of upgrade. There are still, of course, many in the enterprise sector that have invested already, aided by manufacturers promising easy upgrades to 802.11n (and those claims will surely be tested over the next year). But there's no doubt that many have held back, and continue to do so.

Bridge
Attempting to bridge the gap is the Wi-Fi Alliance. Formed in 1999, and featuring 300 wireless vendors from more than 20 countries, the Alliance, in its own words, "develops rigorous tests and conducts Wi-Fi certification of wireless devices that implement the universal IEEE 802.11 specifications. The end result leads to the confidence that both home and enterprise users need to continue to get the most out of Wi-Fi."

In the 802.11n saga, the Wi-Fi Alliance has had an increasingly prominent role to play. Back in 2004, when some manufacturers were already jumping the gun and announcing plans for draft-n equipment, the Alliance was quick to denounce those concerned, threatening to withdraw its Wi-Fi Certified status from products as a result. And in recent times, this status has taken on a new significance, for in the vacuum created by the lack of a formal, ratified standard, the Wi-Fi Alliance has stepped in and started testing and certifying draft-n wireless equipment instead. Arguing that it didn't expect the 802.11n standard to be officially approved until March of 2009, the Alliance has stepped in and provided what at first could be an interim standard, yet longer term could prove to be even more significant than that. The fact that Intel adopted a draft 802.11n standard to integrate into its Centrino Pro platform last year also points to, perhaps, the increasing irrelevance of IEEE to the standard the more it pontificates over formal approval.

Legacy
As 802.11n stands, the formal standard is clearly on the final path to official approval, and one way or another it's expected to get its final sign off in the next twelve months. But the legacy of the process could haunt IEEE for years to come. Hardware manufacturers and many in the IT industry as a whole have grown frustrated as to how, in a fast-moving industry, an evolved standard can take five years to be approved. By the point 802.11n is rubber-stamped, many manufacturers will already be looking beyond that, and perhaps looking for fresh leadership of the process as well.

For ultimately, and perhaps damningly, when the standard does get its green light, it's almost an irrelevance, because so much of the market is happily using draft-n equipment anyway. With compatibility issues between the draft and the formal standard expected to be a lesser concern than in the past as well (although that's something the people, clearly, aren't taking for granted), a body who has done so much to help define the working standards for modern day computing has simply failed to keep up with the pace of the market it works in. And all the while, the saga of 802.11n goes on...
Author: Simon Brew
IT Pro Online



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