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Give us 802.11g - "we want to believe!"

Broadcom has started whipping up enthusiasm for "the next wireless mainstream product" as it believes (hopes) 802.11g will become. We announced the Linksys product, and there are others ...

The company behind the Linksys 11g product is Broadcom and boy! is it evangelising the new technology. It needs to: there are plenty of people who are sceptical, saying that it will never run at the 54 megabit/second speed which is its design rate, because of interference from Bluetooth and 802.11b (standard WiFi).

To overcome inertia, Broadcome has hit on the idea of getting its customers to endorse the product. The companies "voicing their support" in this week's PR extravanza include AMD, Belkin, Broadcom, Bromax, Fujitsu, HP, Linksys, Melco/Buffalo and Netgear.

"Broad Range of OEMs and Technology Providers Applaud Progress on IEEE 802.11g Draft Specification," is the way Broadcom sees it, and it has done a major press release quoting not just their names, but also a paragraph of eulogy from senior staff at each.

Example: "802.11g is an important technology for MELCO/Buffalo because of the range and throughput advantages that it offers. In addition, backward compatibility to 802.11b is an important consideration for our large installed customer base," - attributed to Takashi Ishidoshiro, Chief Technologist for MELCO. "We are aggressively pursuing development of 802.11g products and plan to continue our market leadership by being the first company to offer the technology in Japan."

Similar self-serving puffs are quoted from people like Kevin Frost, HP Vice President of Marketing for Notebooks, Patrick Lo, Chairman and CEO of NetGear, and all the rest. No surprise there! they want to sell this stuff.

What is perhaps surprising, is the apparently uncritical enthusiasm from some normally judicial commentators. For example, Eric Griffith at 80211-Planet remarks with (almost) unwonted excitement: "For those who have been putting off buying an 802.11b-based wireless LAN because it's too slow at that measly 11 or 22 megabits per second (Mbps), yet don't want higher-speed 802.11a products because they aren't compatible with all the WLAN equipment already out there, or you don't want to spend the extra cash on the hybrid dual-band products -- perhaps your time has come." Perhaps, indeed.

The interesting thing is that Broadcom itself admits that it has jumped the gun. "The 802.11g specification is in the approval process of the International Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards committee. The IEEE also specified IEEE 802.11b, the dominant standard for wireless networks today," says the press announcement.

It doesn't go on, unfortunately, to say how Broadcom will retrofit any changes to the standard which occur between now and ratification, into equipment you buy today. It is merely tub-thumping marketing - "Just as wired LAN standards evolved from 10 Mbps Ethernet to Fast Ethernet (10/100 Mbps), the wireless LAN standards are evolving as well, providing a bridge for backward compatibility of existing users. The installed base of wireless LAN users employs 802.11b Wi-Fi at 11 Mbps, which operates in the 2.4 GHz frequency spectrum. The anticipated 802.11g specification is an improvement analogous to that of Fast Ethernet over 10 Mbps Ethernet. In this case, the new standard provides up to 54 Mbps data transfer in the same 2.4 GHz frequency band, providing complete compatibility with the installed base."

That's not the whole story, though. Ask about compatibility, and even the manufacturers who are joining the Broadcom bandwagon will admit that if you run 802.11b and 802.11g in the same area, the 11g will slow down enormously. Some say "only to a fall-back 20 megabits per second rate" others say "It could slow right down to 11b speeds.

Rival chip maker, Intersil, is not singing exactly the same tune. Yes, it has announced its plans to exhibit 802.11g with its Prism GT chipset in a Ubicom access point, and was expected to show up at Comdex with samples - but reports suggest that "According to company representatives at Fall Comdex in Las Vegas, Intersil has elected not to put its optional standard into the next generation Prism GT two-chip 802.11g chip family. Instead, Intersil will only offer 802.11g's two mandatory modes."

These are 802.11b's CCK to achieve bit transfer rates of 5.5 and 11Mbps, and 802.11a's OFDM for theoretical speeds of up to 54Mbps 2.4Ghz range. But that's not the only proposed standard; there's another from Texas Instruments, and it's far from clear which way the final approved standard will jump.

Texas has also jumped the gun; it is shipping its own modulation scheme in its own, non-standard (admittedly!) PBCC mode, calling it 802.11b+ in the hope of fooling the innocent. It will work, it will be fast - but it won't be standard in this important sense; it won't co-work with anybody else's 11g-alike wireless.