Dell defends draft Wi-Fi standard

Dell is to upgrade its wireless cards to support an unratified standard.

The much-hyped 802.11n Wi-Fi standard promises transmission speeds of up to 300Mbps when it is finalised in two years' time. Dell said it would join a growing list of vendors offering wireless products based on 802.11n before the final version is drawn up.

The Wi-Fi Alliance — whose membership consists of wireless-equipment vendors, including Dell  — will, in the meantime, certify equipment according to a draft version of 802.11n. The final version of the standard will be finished in March 2009, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance. The delay between certification and the final standard could mean that access points and client devices produced now could cease to interoperate when the standard is complete.

The man heading up Dell's relationship with the Wi-Fi Alliance believes it will not matter that the standard has not yet been ratified, because the standard is more or less complete. "At this point in time, we feel very comfortable that the standard is stable and pretty solid," Liam Quinn, Dell's chief technology officer for communications, security, peripherals and systems, told ZDNet.co.uk. "With the mechanics now of how it is going to be rubber-stamped to be a standard, we don't believe there [are] going to be any significant changes in the technical terms."

He does not believe that delivering products before ratification is wrong, but he admitted that it was unusual. "Now, [coming out early] is leaning a little bit into the wind, from an industry perspective," he said. "Typically, in years past, the Wi-Fi Alliance would wait for the last day for the standard to be ratified and then ship."

What is different in this case, he said, is "the stability of the specification [and] the active participation in the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] of a lot of the silicon providers".

Quinn said that, as the industry was comfortable with the standard, users could feel comfortable in purchasing products with the standard, and that the only changes that might be made are "minor tweaks". In any case, these tweaks would be easily implemented because they were upgradeable through software, he said.

"Dell are shipping product and Dell are shipping those chipsets, because they have the flexibility, from an architectural perspective, to be software upgradeable to comply with any minor tweaks in the standard," Quinn added.

Earlier this month, the Wi-Fi Alliance revealed the logo for the second and latest draft of the 802.11n standard. The logo will be placed on all certified products using the technology, but there was some scepticism.

802.11n promises up to five times the throughput and twice the range of the previous fastest standard, 802.11g, and it works in both previous frequencies: 2.4GHz and 5GHz.