The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Task Group
assigned to explore the next-generation standard for 802.11 has a difficult
choice to make in the next day or so.
For months, Task Group “G” has been trying to come to terms on a
modulation scheme that would allow 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) hardware to
transmit data at speeds approaching a “wired” Ethernet. But in its most
recent vote Wednesday morning, the group again failed to agree on a proposal
backed by Irvine, Calif.-based Intersil. Now there is a motion before the
entire IEEE to consider scrapping months of hard work altogether.
The news is proving to have a negative effect on Intersil’s stock, The G group voted 55-45 in favor of establishing a new standard, which is After this week’s meetings are adjourned, the IEEE isn’t scheduled to “The adoption of any new technology is at least partially based upon A brief history In order to enhance the standard, the IEEE’s overall Working Group that But the road to the next generation was bumpy along the way. Task Group G Since then, TI officials has been lobbying their Intersil counterparts Yet, Intersil was unfortunately left with its own political stalemate The 802.11a Train 802.11a is currently only licensed for usage in North America as opposed Thanks to the hard work of companies like Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Meanwhile, TI has also forged ahead with its own turbo-rate WLAN Still, Seymore pointed out that all is not lost for Intersil. “First, by rejecting Intersil’s 802.11g solution, the IEEE board delays “Second, the lack of an 802.11g standard may actually improve WLAN market
which rose ahead of this week’s IEEE regularly scheduled
meeting in Austin, Texas. “If the solution does not receive the 75-percent
approval, we believe the market could react negatively on a temporary
basis,” said Ross Seymore, analyst at Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown.
based on Intersil’s Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) — a
modulation scheme favored by the Federal Communications Commission because
it uses less of the precious eletro-magnetic spectrum. According to the
IEEE’s bylaws, a proposal needs to reach the 75-percent support threshold
before it can move forward for the entire 500-member working group to
consider.
reconvene until January. By then, however, other forms of 802.11 are
expected to begin commercial rollout. Several vendors have already announced
delivery by the first quarter. And with players like Cisco Systems and Intel buzzing about WLANs at this week’s Comdex show in Las Vegas, the loser through all of this could be the all-important end-user.
consumers’ ability to discern a clear technology roadmap,” Alex. Brown’s
Seymore wrote in his research notes.
The first 802.11 standard of the mid-1990s gave birth to the current
802.11b standard, which was approved by the IEEE in 1999. As outlined by the
802.11b specification, chip sets would use a modulation scheme known as
Complementary Code Keying (CCK) to transmit data signals at 11
megabits-per-second (Mbps) through an unlicensed portion of the spectrum
found at about 2.4GHz. Considered revolutionary at the time (and by some
measures…even still today), 802.11b gave way to a new generation of
products that allowed an Ethernet connection to finally break free of wires
but its speed was still only one-tenth that of its wired brethren.
oversaw the development of 802.11 assigned individual tasks to several
specialty groups — each with the goal of further advancing the technology.
The mission of 802.11g was to boost the data transmission to the so-called
“turbo” rates of 54 Mbps while still maintaining interoperability with earlier
specs. This way, consumers (and enterprise users, vendors, investors and
just about everyone else) who bet on earlier versions of the technology
would know how the market would eventually evolve.
(which totals about 175 people) broke off into two separate camps after May
when a proposal by Texas Instruments was taken out
of consideration. No words could have summed up how TI officials must
have felt. They had been working for years on that proposal. They made sure
their modulation scheme, known as Packet Binary Convolution Coding (PBCC),
became an accepted alternative to the original CCK schema in order to ensure
full backward-capability. In fact, they even invested $300 million to
acquire a company (Alantro Communications) that helped develop PBCC.
long and hard to include elements of its proprietary technology into a
standard that would be called 802.11g. But Intersil has repeatedly (and
successfully) argued that such a hybrid product wouldn’t be practical in its
design and deployment.
when it came to its proposal. It wouldn’t lose and yet it couldn’t win. The proposal
couldn’t muster up the mandatory 75-percent support threshold. G Task Group Chairman Matthew B. Shoemake, Ph.D. (who is an Alantro official) was unsure how to proceed. Intersil argued the only thing to do was to keep compromising until the threshold could be met. But by the time
the procedural debate was resolved, the vote was again delayed due to
the events of Sept. 11.
And all the while during the months of bipartisan rhethoric, other
companies forged ahead with another derivation of the wireless technology.
When the original 802.11b specification was approved in 1999, the IEEE
concurrently approved the specs for 802.11a. These chip sets are designed to
use the OFDM schema to transmit data at 54 Mbps through a separate portion
of spectrum (located somewhere in the 5GHz range).
to 802.11b which is accepted throughout Europe and Asia as well. But the
main hurdle facing the end-user is that the two specs — 802.11b and
802.11a — were never meant to interoperate. Still, that hasn’t stopped
household names like Intel and 3Com from already announcing their support of
802.11a.
start-up Atheros Communications,
gear makers have reference design that can be used as the basis for
next-generation products.
technology, which already has the support of big name vendors such as
Linksys. Although no official announcement has been made, Linksys is quietly
showing WLAN hardware at this week’s Comdex show based on TI’s ACX
100 technology, which could be on the market by the beginning of 2002.
the introduction of a standard to compete with the 802.11b standard, where
Intersil currently enjoys a dominant position. This could lengthen the time
for 802.11b to penetrate the WLAN market before 802.11a or any other
competing standard enters the market.
clarity…The differences between 802.11a and 802.11b already create
sufficient confusion for potential WLAN buyers, and we believe the adoption
of a third standard could further exacerbate this confusion, thereby slowing
overall WLAN adoption rates.”
