Q&A: Wi-Fi Alliance exec explains about-face on 802.11n standard
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Wi-Fi Alliance Managing Director Frank Hanzlik discusses the  sudden change by the alliance to start testing in mid-2007 of wireless LAN  components, and other products before final ratification of an 802.11n standard.
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The Wi-Fi Alliance appears to have lost patience with vendors who it feels have been jumping the gun by launching wireless products using standards that have not been ratified by the Alliance.
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Intel Corporation has decided not to enable the wireless access-point function in its new Intel &quot;Grantsdale&quot; chip. A company spokesman confirmed that Intel has decided to phase
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A second consortium puts in a bid for the faster 802.11n spec. But don't expect a battle over formats.
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Cisco Systems sees a big market for WiMax, but not primarily in high-profile deployments in the developed world such as&#160;Sprint Nextel&#39;s nationwide network, planned for commercial launch in the U.S. next year.Cisco&#39;s acquisition of Navini Networks, expected to close in January, will make it a vendor of wireless radios to carriers for the first time, even though it has been selling the infrastructure behind all kinds of radios for several years. The prospect of getting in early on a market transition was one thing that made WiMax attractive, according to Brett Galloway, vice president and general manager of Cisco&#39;s wireless networking business unit.But the main opportunity Cisco sees is in building networks in developing countries, initially to bring broadband to stationary users, company executives said Wednesday at the annual C-Scape analyst conference in San Jose, California. That&#39;s a long way from the vision of mobility that Intel and other big backers of WiMax promoted for several years. Even an Intel executive on a panel with the Cisco executives played up WiMax as an alternative to DSL (digital subscriber line) or cable broadband. That&#39;s likely to be the role of WiMax for the foreseeable future in markets with poor or no wired infrastructure, said Sriram Viswanathan, general manager of the WiMax Program Office at Intel Capital. But he&#39;s not giving up on mobile WiMax there.&quot;We see that as almost an entry step for these markets to get onto the mobility bandwagon,&quot; Viswanathan said.The carriers in developing countries are insisting on gear based on IEEE 802.16e, the standard for mobile WiMax, rather than on an earlier specification limited to fixed services, said Roger Dorf, president and CEO of Navini. They want the capability to eventually offer a mobile service, especially because many such carriers have both wired and wireless divisions, he said. But right now, Cisco sees WiMax giving many residents of poorer countries, who overwhelmingly still use desktop PCs, their first broadband experience. Desktops will dominate those markets for the next two years, in Dorf&#39;s view.Cisco isn&#39;t dismissing WiMax for advanced countries, just identifying the most attractive market to start with, Galloway said. However, the executives don&#39;t see much potential in unlicensed WiMax, such as deployments across large enterprise campuses. The unlicensed variety will remain a niche product, primarily for point-to-point backhaul links, Galloway said.Mobile WiMax is designed so it can be used without an external antenna or gateway box, so a user should be able to take a notebook or other portable device anywhere in the network&#39;s coverage area and connect. But some analysts say this &quot;nomadic&quot; capability is a far cry from the true mobility that cellular technologies have been designed to deliver from the beginning. WiMax will complement but not compete with future high-speed versions of 3G systems, namely LTE (Long-Term Evolution), the next step in the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) technology track, according to Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates.Cisco isn&#39;t taking sides in the next-generation radio fight, said Larry Lang, vice president and general manager of Cisco&#39;s Services and Mobility Business Unit. Cisco will win in any case because it supplies the IP (Internet Protocol) packet infrastructure that will link different access networks together, he said.The company does see an affinity between WiMax and Wi-Fi, where it is a dominant player. Both are IP-based and standardized, and no one company has dominated innovation in either technology, Galloway said. Simply the advent of a new type of portable broadband experience is good news for the network giant.&quot;If we drive innovation on end devices and applications, and we drive the penetration and ubiquity of networks ... we create enormous value for Cisco ... for the ecosystem ... and for our customers,&quot; Galloway said.&#160;
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WiMax-capable products were on display all over the CES trade show, yet the announcement at Macworld of Apple's stylishly thin MacBook Air laptop made no reference to the high-speed newtork. Does Steve Jobs know something other vendors don't?
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Despite the best efforts of the Wi-Fi industry to assure companies wireless networking is safe in the workplace, a new survey of executives finds security remains the leading barrier to WLAN adoption.
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It will be more than a year before the 802.11n wireless LAN standard is officially ratified, but columnist Craig Mathias claims that the time to deploy this new technology is now.
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This report analyzes the role that resellers and integrators play in distributing, selling, deploying, and managing enterprise 802.11 wireless LANs.
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Apple has updated its AirPort Extreme wireless networking product to improve compatibility and to fix a security issue.
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Insurgency by wannabe telcos Comment "The important thing to understand about WiSOA is its members have all had the WiMAX debate," he says. "We have all decided that WiMAM is the future, and we have all committed to roll WiMax out within our businesses." That's the explanation for the launch of the WiMax Spectrum Owners Alliance, offered by Patrick Cruise OâBrien, the group's secretary general, after its launch in Paris.â¦
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Cisco systems Inc. has teamed up with Cognio Inc. on a system designed to ferret out the source of radio frequency noise that can interfere with WiFi networks.
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The upgrade enables the chip to also connect to less common 802.11a and 802.11i versions of Wi-Fi. SAN FRANCISCO: Intel Corp. said it has upgraded the wireless networking capabilities of its Centrino line
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Ziff Davis - Mobile computing pioneer Andrew Seybold says PDA users "will pay the freight" to keep Wi-Fi networks in business. He also weighs in on other wireless trends at the CTIA Wireless show in San Francisco.
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Netgear is launching three new wireless networking products that aim to address the problem, perennially discussed at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, of complicated home networking setup.&quot;Our customers in their homes or small offices should be able to utilize high-speed broadband networking for any application, including communications, information gathering or entertainment, from any corner of the house without any interruption,&quot; said Patrick Lo, chairman, CEO and founder of Netgear. Like the heating system in a house, a home network should work reliably, without much thought by users, he said.Using the new devices unveiled at the conference, a Netgear executive demonstrated simultaneous wireless streaming of an HD video, live HD gaming, and video downloading -- and then removed a hard drive from the storage device -- all without a glitch.The new products include the RangeMax Dual Band Wireless N Router, which incorporates new antenna technology developed by Netgear. The router contains eight antennas, which Netgear says ensures quality streaming despite potential interference from other wireless gear including microwave ovens, cordless phones and neighboring Wi-Fi networks.&quot;It&#39;s always better to have many antennas... but densely packing them inside the unit has been historically impossibly to achieve with good performance,&quot; said Vivek Pathela, vice president of product marketing for Netgear. Netgear&#39;s new technology allows many antennas to operate inside a device, delivering good performance, he said.The router also includes new technology that lets users push a button to automatically set up a secure connection between the router and any other standard client. Typically, users must work through a software application to set up secure connections.Netgear also introduced the ReadyNAS Duo, a media server designed to centrally store any digital media including videos, photos and music. In an unusual feature for a consumer device, the ReadyNAS supports hot swapping -- allowing users to remove a drive without interrupting streaming or other use of the device.The ReadyNAS comes in several configurations, including with 500GB of storage for $500.An optional second drive in the device automatically mirrors the content of the first to protect against potential loss of data. An even larger version of the ReadyNas can handle 4TB of data.Users can connect PCs, Macs, HD TVs and IP (Internet Protocol) set-top boxes to the server. It also has a USB (Universal Serial Bus) port for connecting digital cameras to upload photos and view them on a TV.Consumers that want to use the ReadyNas but don&#39;t want to upgrade their existing router, can buy the new HD/Gaming 5GHz Wireless-N Networking Kit. The kit comes with two units. Users attach one to their current router, which could comply with the older Wireless B or Wireless G standards. The other device connects to other clients such as a gaming console or HD TV to create a wireless connection. The kit essentially upgrades an existing network to deliver high performance video, Pathela said.Netgear hopes that these new products, possibly combined with 15 others the company is introducing at CES, will address the challenges that many people face when setting up networks in their homes. For many, the variety of wired and wireless technologies, many of which don&#39;t interoperate, have made home networks too challenging to tackle. For the past several years, technology companies at CES have focused on trying to solve this problem.
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(InfoWorld) - The Wi-Fi connection on Apple's recently releasedÂ iPhoneÂ seems to be the source of a big headache for network administrators at Duke University. The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the Durham, N.C. school's pervasive wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a help desk ticket with Apple. But so far, the precise cause of the problem remains unknown. "Because of the time of year for us, it's not a severe problem," says Kevin Miller, assistant director, communications infrastructure, with Duke's Office of Information Technology. "But from late August through May, our wireless net is critical. My concern is how many students will be coming back in August with iPhones? It's a pretty big annoyance, right now, with 20-30 access points signaling they're down, and then coming back up a few minutes later. But in late August, this would be devastating." That's because the misbehaving iPhones flood the access points with up to 18,000 address requests per second, nearly 10Mbps of bandwidth, and monopolizing the AP's airtime. The access points show up as "out of service." For 10-15 minutes, there's no way to communicate with them, Miller says. "When the problem occurs, we see dozens of access points in that condition," Miller says. The network team began capturing wireless traffic for analysis and that's when they discovered that the offending devices were iPhones. Right now, Miller says, there are about 150 of the Apple devices registered on the campus WLAN. The requests are for what is, at least for Duke's network, an invalid router address. Devices use the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) to request the MAC address of the destination node, for which it already has the IP address. When it doesn't get an answer, the iPhone just keeps asking. "I'm not exactly sure where the 'bad' router address is coming from," Miller says. One possibility: each offending iPhone may have been first connected to a home wireless router or gateway, and it may automatically and repeatedly be trying to reconnect to it again when something happens to the iPhone's initial connection on the Duke WLAN. They're still sorting out what that "something" is. On two occasions, one last Friday and one today, Monday 16 July, both users seemed to be behaving completely normally, yet both iPhones started flooding the net with ARP requests. In both cases, the user first successfully connected to the WLAN at one location, and then moved to another building, where the ARP flood began. "It may have something to do with the iPhone losing connectivity and then trying to reconnect in a new location," Miller says. Most of the W LAN is comprised of Cisco thin access points and controllers. Some older autonomous Cisco Aironet access points tend to uncover the flooding first, since they try to resolve the ARP request themselves. But Miller's team has seen the CPU utilization on the WLAN controllers spiking as they try to process the request flood passed on to them in control traffic from the thin access points. "I don't believe it's a Cisco problem in any way, shape, or form," he says firmly. So far, the communication with Apple has been "one-way," Miller says, with the Duke team filing the problem ticket. He says Apple has told him the problem is being "escalated" but as of mid-afternoon Monday, nothing substantive had been heard Apple.
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Certified by September, but spec not due till 2008 The Wi-Fi Alliance has started testing kit conforming to the second draft of the 802.11n standard, expecting certified products to be on the shelves by September, despite the fact that the final version of the standard isn't expected until next year.â¦