By Sept. 11, it’s probable that the 802.11n standard will finally be approved, reports PC Mag. If approved, the 802.11n effort will have taken exactly seven years, from the first meeting of the “High Throughput Study Group,” the precursor to TGn, on September 11, 2002.
On Friday, Bob Heile, the chairman of the IEEE 802.15 working group on Personal Area Networks, sent an email confirming that the IEEE 802.11n draft standard had been sent on to the Standards Review Committee (RevCom), which formally recommends standards for approval.
RevCom is scheduled to meet in Piscataway, New Jersey, from Sept 9 through Sept. 11. The committee meets on a quarterly basis.
For the 802.11n standard, the standards process has been an agonizingly slow process, dating back almost five years to 2004, says PC Mag. A draft version of 802.11n was approved in January 2006, prompting the first wave of routers based on the so-called draft-n standard shortly thereafter.
The wireless industry hit a major roadblock in May of that year, however, when the draft 802.11n standard failed to pass. In May 2007, the Wi-Fi Alliance agreed to certify the draft-n products to kickstart the market.
Previous versions of IEEE WiFi have had a channel bandwidth of 20MHz, but 802.11n has an optional mode extending the channel bandwidth to 40 MHz. While the channel bandwidth is doubled, the number of data subcarriers is slightly more than doubled, going from 52 to 108. This yields a total channel throughput of 150 Mbps. Combining four channels with MIMO, can deliver up to 600 Mbps.
The September meeting might also cement the future of so-called 60-GHz technology being developed by SiBEAM and its rivals, also known as 802.15.3c.
The 802.11 committee, meanwhile, has reportedly exhausted the single-letter alphabet. Initiatives like very-high-throughput, currently under development, combine two letters. 802.11ac (TGac) might double speed by increasing the total data throughput available to a cluster of users in a relatively dense environment. It won’t do much for an individual, however. A different standard, 802.11ad (TGad) will utilize 60-GHz spectrum.
