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ABI: 802.11n Wireless Chipsets Are Not Perfect, But They'll Improve By Mae Kowalke TMCnet Associate Editor The first generation of 802.11n wireless chipsets set to hit the market soon may be new, but that doesn’t make them marvelous. ABI Research describes the new chipsets as “lackluster,” suffering from a range of problems including less-than-steller performance and interoperability.
That’s not to say that the 802.11n standard doesn’t have promise, ABI added, but simply that the promise has yet to be fully delivered. “The shortcomings of these first attempts do not spell disaster for the 802.11n standard or the chipset manufacturers,” the research firm said in a press release.
ABI analyst Philip Solis, pointed out that, “There will be more generations of chipsets; these issues will all be worked out, more likely during 2006 than later.”
Solis went on to predict that everything is “still on track to have the standard ratified by around mid-2007, which was the original plan.”
Taking a look at problems with the new chipsets, another ABI analyst, Sam Lucero, said that “While they connect at high speeds at close range, these devices' performance tends to fall off rapidly with increasing distance. And interoperability is neither as robust nor as seamless as it should be.”
Problems with interoperability are particularly annoying, Lucero added, because that was a benefit the Enhanced Wireless Consortium promoted heavily during the development of the 802.11n standard draft.
It’s not the EWC’s fault, though.
”The whole idea behind the EWC was that they were going to provide a clear path to interoperability, but vendors rushed into the market, and at least with this initial run of chipsets, good interoperability does not seem to have been achieved,” Lucero said in the release. ----- Mae Kowalke previously wrote for Cleveland Magazine in Ohio and The Burlington Free Press in Vermont. To see more of her articles, please visit Mae Kowalke’s columnist page.
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