Wireless - An Inconvenient Standard
By Greg Vitarelli, Managing Director, Sherpa

Since 2006, Sherpa has been involved in some interesting work on the problems with Draft 802.11n, a wireless standard. For the uninitiated, Draft 11n is a major breakthrough which will deliver data to wireless devices faster than standard Ethernet cabling (100 megabytes per second) and seven times faster than today’s wireless routers.

The problem isn’t the technology but rather the standards which ensure it all works as promised and that various brands’ devices claiming the same performance work together.  Standards bodies are incredibly important to ensuring confidence in new technologies so adoption can begin and proliferation achieved to stimulate mass market consumption at lower prices.

An increasing amount of people rely on their laptops for most business activities, which means they rely on a fast internet connection.  The modern office resembles something of a hot-desk hodgepodge where people grab a seat, some coffee and some bandwidth and therein lies the problem.

When it comes to hardware, today’s user isn’t interested in letters and numbers – it’s an old way of thinking now reserved for geeks.  Today’s users are graphic titans who want to simultaneously send emails, download MP3s, watch YouTube clips and use social networking and web 2.0 apps while running demanding applications locally. It’s a lot of work for the processor and the router too and users are finding the data just doesn’t travel fast enough.

Until now, wireless network speeds have been restricted to 54Mbs with wireless ‘N’s predecessor, 802.11g ('wireless g’). This has been acceptable for most people so far, but multiple user environments exist in many homes now and data is much larger as digital formats bulk up with ever-increasing quality.  In this environment, a faster connection is a necessity.

While the 802.11n standard has not been officially approved, many wireless equipment companies have bucked the trend and developed products based upon the developing standard, much to the chagrin of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEEE) which is moving through the various chapters that will lead to an approved standard in early 2009.  By then, technology based on the same performance will have been sold to consumers and businesses alike for the previous two years.

Perhaps this time the standards bodies were not working at the speed demanded by the market, so their cautionary approach was trumped by consumers willing to take a chance on interoperability problems for the promise of screaming fast WiFi.

Contact Greg Vitarelli, Sherpa Media

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