The good news is that there's a new generation of wireless networking products on the horizon, products that feature about four times as much coverage and more than 10 times faster access than traditional WiFi networks.
The bad news is that this new-and-improved wireless standard doesn't actually exist yet, even though there's no shortage of retailers who are more than willing to sell it to you right now.
Sound confusing? It is.
Currently, the fastest established (remember that word) standard for wireless networking is called 802.11g or "wireless G." Routers and adapters based on it are readily available to businesses and consumers at just about any retailer. And since it's a universally agreed-upon standard, wireless G products made by different manufacturers work with one another.
Over the past year and a half or so, industry players have been working on a new standard: 802.11n. Wireless N products are similar to their G predecessors, except they have the wireless equivalent of racing engines, providing vastly superior coverage and speed. For many businesses, the arrival of N makes the switch to wireless an easy decision -- a faster connection means the ability to do such things as stream high-definition video without clogging the network and send massive amounts of business data seamlessly, while better coverage means not having to litter the office with access points.
But N is still hitting speed bumps on the way to becoming a fully established standard, as various wireless and telecommunication companies fight over the specifics. For example, companies such as Motorola Inc. are worried they may not be able to build N into cellphones if certain proposed technical specifications are made mandatory, which means the current draft version of wireless N could change before the standard is finalized.
This battle is currently being fought in the meeting rooms of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the group responsible for issuing universal standards for such technology. Because the IEEE works on a "one person, one vote" system, there have been allegations that companies are sponsoring myriad academics and others to the group's conferences just to vote on their behalf. Similar allegations of deliberately slowing the process also abound.
The group's members are currently looking over a first draft of the proposed N standard, but there's little in the way of the consensus that's required to ratify the draft. And after the standard is ratified -- which is now unlikely to happen before mid-2007 -- separate groups such as the WiFi Alliance will have to go through their own certification processes to make sure various N products work with each other.
Until a universal standard for N is officially established, there's no telling what the specifications will be for the final version. That means an N product bought today may not be compatible with the final standard, which all subsequent products will have to adhere to. To get around this, some retailers are offering so-called "pre-N" or "draft N" products, which are generally faster than G products. However, there's no guarantee they will work with newer generations of N, or even the pre-N products sold by other manufacturers. In some cases, pre-N products have proven incompatible with other pre-N devices made by the same company.
"The scary part right now is that you have this draft 1.0 that nobody can agree on, and companies are going out and selling it to consumers anyway," said Glenn Fleishman, editor of Wi-Fi Networking News.
Some companies don't even mention that N isn't standardized yet. A full-page Future Shop ad in newspapers recently declared: "Wireless-N. It's a revolution in Networking." The ad offered a special price on a Linksys wireless N router and laptop adapter, but made no mention of the format being non-standard. Future Shop and Linksys representatives did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment.
Mr. Fleishman has contacted several companies asking whether they're willing to guarantee that the N versions of equipment they're shipping now will be compatible with the final standard, but so far has received no positive replies. He suspects companies won't feel comfortable making such guarantees until this fall, and that N products might be safe to purchase by about November, once the industry has a better idea of what the final standard will be.
For a consumer buying draft N equipment today, that could mean paying anywhere from $100 to $200 more than the price of standard wireless G WiFi gear -- for a technology that has compatibility issues and that could quickly become obsolete. For businesses, the cost of a major rollout of pre-N equipment could be much greater.
"It will be great," Mr. Fleishman said of wireless N's promised speed and coverage, "but there's no consumer benefit to buying draft N gear. The only reason for companies to sell it now is to compete for branding."
