802.11n Finally Certified
admin on September 30th, 2009
At last, the long suffering 802.11n draft standard has been made official, and is released from its draft prison with the IEEE finally ratified the latest longer range, higher speed version of the wireless standard. This move took a good seven years since the process kicked off, and a couple of years after the final draft was approved with a slew of hardware companies following suit by releasing 802.11n gear to the market. Makes us wonder what took them so long to review and approve this standard to move it up from draft. Well, all said and done, we would like to give the old proverb a handshake as it tells us “better late than never!”
People who criticize companies like Microsoft and Apple for pursuing their own de facto standards instead of working through formal standards bodies might consider the long, strange history of Wi-Fi. The IEEE has finally ratified the latest longer range, higher speed version of the wireless standard. The move came seven years after the process began and more than two years after an all-but-final draft was approved and companies started deploying 802.11n gear.
In fact, Wi-Fi has succeeded, and has improved steadily, only because hardware and software companies have regularly given up of the pokey IEEE standards-setting process and have forged ahead on their own. There have been occasional issues of incompatibility, but it has been better than the alternative of waiting forever.
Apple and Lucent launched Wi-Fi products back in the 1990s before the IEEE ratified the original 802.11b standard. Even the Wi-Fi Alliance, a trade group more conservative than the hardware makers, has certified new standards long before the IEEE formally adopted them.
