dailywireless.org » 802.11n: Yea, UWB: Nea

802.11n: Yea, UWB: Nea

There was good news and bad news out of the IEEE meetup in Hawaii this week. First the good news.

The IEEE has unanimously approved a draft version of 802.11n the next bump up in speed for WiFi, reports C/Net and Unstrung. The long-anticipated 802.11n specification will operate in the same 2.4 and 5 Ghz bands as today’s WiFi gear and it will be backwards compatible with it.

But 802.11n will be way faster — between 100-600 Mbps. The new fast WiFi standard should allow offices to replace their 100 Mbps Ethernet with wireless and it will provide fast wireless networking for multi-media inside homes. The specification includes improved power management for handheld devices, unlike some of the earlier 802.11 specifications. Beamforming and space–time block coding (STBC), methods of improving the reliability and efficiency, are also included.

Broadcom has already announced its “Intensi-fi” chipsets. The Intensi-fi solution includes a MAC/baseband chip and a radio chip that can be configured for a variety of high-speed wireless applications.

The complete portfolio includes the following all-CMOS components:

BCM4321 — The world’s first media access controller (MAC) and baseband compliant with the 802.11n draft specification, providing PHY rates of over 300 Mbps and interfacing to PCI, Cardbus and PCI-Express® hosts;
BCM2055 — Broadcom’s fifth-generation 802.11 radio, which integrates multiple 2.4 and 5 GHz radios to support simultaneous spatial streams for draft 802.11n products with 2×2, 3×3, or 4×4 antenna configurations. The BCM2055 is the best-performing 802.11 radio, featuring smaller die size, lower power consumption, and lower phase noise and error vector magnitude (EVM) than competing products — all of which are critical for high-throughput draft 802.11n systems;
BCM4704 — Broadcom’s proven fifth-generation wireless network processor, which provides advanced routing/bridging capabilities and is tuned to meet the performance targets of the draft 802.11n chipset for router and gateway designs;
BCM4705 — Broadcom’s sixth-generation wireless network processor, which supports simultaneous operation of 2.4 and 5 GHz radios and integrates a Gigabit Ethernet MAC to enable greater than 100 Mbps throughput between draft 802.11n and Ethernet networks.

Atheros demonstrated its next-generation XSPAN family of MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) wireless solutions at CES. The new wireless products are capable of delivering 300Mbps across the entire home environment using an innovative 3 x 3 transmitter/receiver architecture. They also support the approved IEEE 802.11n draft.

Marvell’s 88W836X family, first announced in October 2005, complies 100% with the IEEE 802.11n draft specification with a low-power client solutions for cell phone/portable consumer WLAN technology. Marvell is offering a broad range of WLAN chipsets targeted at retail clients, PCs, laptops, access points, routers, gateways and embedded consumer devices.

Broadcom, Atheros, Marvell and others may be jumping the gun a bit. Steven Schroedl, founder of Verilan, who does contract work for the IEEE meetings, told DailyWireless that full ratification of the standard may not happen until January — of 2007.

Schroedl also feels that the other high speed wireless standard - UltraWideBand - will suffer as a result of competition from the consensus in fast WiFi. UWB is designed to provide “Wireless USB and “Wireless Firewire” with speeds of 400 Mbps or so. But the range of UWB is limited to about 10-30 feet.

Here’s the bad news:

The IEEE 802.15.3a working group, which hoped to unite UWB factions, threw in the towel this week and disbanded. The IEEE gave up on uniting the two incompatible UWB camps. In the end there was no consensus between the Motorola/Freescale backed Direct-Sequence UWB group and the Intel-led WiMedia Alliance (~~also known as~~ and its new cousin: EWC), which uses the multiband (MB-OFDM) alternative and frequencies in the 5 GHz band (among other differences).That means consumers will be stuck with two incompatible UWB standards — “Wireless USB” and “Cable-free USB”. A classic BetaMax/VHS dilema.