Last week the IEEE 802.11 voted for a ban on 40Mhz wide channel bonding on the 2.4 Ghz spectrum. The vote was 40 for, 31 against. A 75% majority is needed to pass a technical motion, however, so the ban did not pass. Steven Schroedl, founder of VeriLAN, who was at the IEEE Plenary meeting in Dallas, explained the move to DailyWireless editor, Sam Churchill:
I can see why people would say “why would IEEE 802.11 not want 40Mhz channel. I want to go as fast as possible, give me my big pipe”. The problem I see is the RF from a single AP using 40Mhz channel in a room would prevent a second AP from being used. VeriLAN does build WLAN for IEEE 802, where up to 2000 people will be in one room that is the size of a basketball court during the opening, if I do not have the channel separations between AP needed, then it will be challenging to create a scalable network.
A ban on 40 MHz wide channels would not apply to the 5 GHz band. Meanwhile, companies may well sell 2.4 GHz access points with ganged channels — but don’t expect “N” compliance and compatibility. A “standard” 802.11n spec may not emerge for another year.
Schroedl also said the IEEE 802.11 committee celebrated its 100th session last week. May they have one hundred more.
In other news, WiFi chip maker Atheros will put Gigabit Ethernet in all its Wi-Fi access points, to cope with the 200+ Mbit/s speed of the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard.
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“If people are going to realise the full benefits of 802.11n, we don’t want the Ethernet plug to be the bottleneck,” said Todd Antes, vice president of marketing for Atheros. “Gigabit in mass-market products is still a rare commodity, because it is more expensive. We want to drive it into the mass market. We expect by 2008 that all new 802.11n AP routers will include Gigabit Ethernet.”
Laptops will move to 802.11n next year, said Antes, announcing that some Lenovo notebooks will include Atheros chipsets. Rival Broadcom also announced its 802.11n chips are in laptops from Lenovo and three other manufacturers last week.
Gigabit will be used for multimedia services inside the home, said Antes: “It’s not all about pulling things off the broadband pipe.”
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