802.11n standard has been finally forwarded to the IEEE Standards Board Review Committee

An IEEE 802.11n wireless network standard increases transmission speeds to 100 Mbps and works in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency bands, being compatible with legacy 11a and 11b/g users and will keep its basic requirements while Wi-Fi Alliance will integrate hundreds of other products to operate with the gear based on final standard. In this way users will not face any further integration problems while they attempt to add the standard to their networks.

This standard has started to stir up the spirits between vendors, in this way determining the Wi-Fi Alliance, which is the main industry group, to begin in 2007 attesting around 600 products that were established on a draft version of the specification. These products allowed users to confidently purchase access points, routers and client units to work with other Draft-11n gear. For instance, Draft 2.0 belonging to the standard enabled user to benefit of 11n, having a high performance of 100Mb second or even more boosting, next to other features. Industry analysts said that although the draft products have sold well, there were still some enterprises that refrained themselves from investing, in order to wait for a final, formal standard.

The 802.11n standard has been finally forwarded to the IEEE Standards Board Review Committee which is supposed to vote for the specification in its next meeting set for September 11. Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance group, said that either way, they will maintain the present requirements for basic certification of 802.11n gear, in this way the products will be judges according to the same rules. These products won’t need a re-testing to be evaluated so long as the vendors don’t add new features or make firmware changes to the group’s rules.

Once the certification testing will be conducted in late September around the world, the products should be released on the market in a period of few months following the testing. Kelly Davis Felner said that there are four features that are added as options to the 11n standard: packet aggregation (meant to reduce the quantity of overhead communication that is necessary for transferring data); coexistence (that allows a product with two adjacent channels to withdraw in case of interfering with another network); in order to obtain a higher throughput, it is provided capability to use 3 spatial streams among the existing multiple antennas; a space-time block coding (it is meant to prevent a user of a one spatial stream to slow down a network that utilizes multiple streams).

When back in 1990s IEEE came up with the 802.11 series of wireless LAN standards, Wi-Fi Alliance group was designated to certify the fact that products were up to those standards and able to work with each other. The decision of Wi-Fi Alliance not to wait for IEEE final standard determined the vendors on the market to protest, since the vendors weren’t going to wait, they needed to move on, that is why now, the completion of the standard will not release too much repressed demand for 11n among users, though there might be some businesses to refrain themselves from buying.