No return to the wild Wi-Fi west

To the seasoned watcher of wireless networking, the story is wearily familiar. While the 802.11n committee is completing the first draft of a complex standard not due for completion until 2007, the industry is pushing a wild variety of incompatible products under the unfinished banner. Will they work with the final standard? Will they work with each other? Nobody knows.

It's not just a matter of another bloody standards battle, although that would be bad enough. Because 802.11n works on the same frequencies as existing wireless networks, there is every chance it will interfere with existing inhabitants such as Bluetooth and other 802.11 standards. Fine-tuning the standard so that this won't happen is vitally important: it's also unfinished in Draft 1.0.

The bits that go faster are there, though, and that's all that matters to the manufacturers -- as Ettore Bugatti said when confronted with complaints about his brakes: "I make my cars to go, not to stop". Yet a car with faulty brakes doesn't just kill its driver, which is why today's safety standards are somewhat in advance of those in force in the 1920s.

The same cannot be said of the unlicensed radio bands where wireless networks operate. As part of the deal whereby we get access to them to do what we like -- imagine the hassle of getting a licence for every wireless device you own or use -- the state relinquished responsibility for policing those frequencies. It's the Wild West all over again. If a company wants to sell a device that works really well for its owners and burns the wagons of everyone else, it can. There's no comeback.

And the cowboys in the networking companies are hungry. They saw what happened when Belkin broke ranks and aggressively marketed pre-standard kit for 802.11g, the last big wireless speed upgrade. There was a fair amount of chaos, the standards committee ended up bolting together all manner of compromises, and Belkin won the market. Yet that was four years ago, before there was a hotspot in every Starbucks and a router in every hearth. This is no longer prairie.

Don't buy these unfinished products unless you're prepared to pay a lot more in future to outgun your next door neighbour. Wireless networking only works through co-operation: naked competition and the law of the gun is no recipe for success.