The White Smoke Appears

The White Smoke Appears. It's Official: 802.11g is a ratified, published IEEE standard: The waiting is over, according to a flurry of press releases from manufacturers. The IEEE formally finished its approval process for 802.11g this morning with a final vote. InfoWorld reports on the ratification, but says something about a minimum 24 Mbps requirement. As far as I know the slower OFDM and PBCC encodings are 22 Mbps, and have been essentially discarded except by Texas Instruments (PBCC's owner) in favor of 54 Mbps OFDM. New York Times report [reg. req.]. Among this morning's announcements: Texas Instruments is now ready to ship its 802.11g chipset in quantity to manufacturers that include NetGear, Samsung, Sitecom, SMC Networks, and US Robotics. A turbo mode delivers 50 percent more throughput, they say, but works only among this chipset. Intersil says its Prism Nitro chips are compliant with 802.11g, and that they can increase throughput, too, but its unclear if that's a backwards compatible improvement or requires all Intersil products…. [Wi-Fi Networking News]

Leave a comment