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WiFi approvals for 300 products in two years, says WECA

If you really want to know if a product is WiFi approved as a genuine IEEE 802.11b product, there's a list of 300 products now up on the WECA web site.

It's a remarkable achievement of compatibility of products from several manufacturers, even if there are still issues to be resolved: since the first WiFi product was approved by the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance two years ago, the consortium has clocked up a total of 300 items which meet their specification.

The fly in the ointment, of course, is that the features of WiFi which WECA tests for, aren't the only features that count, these days.

The biggest and most public hole in the approvals net is security: the Wireless Equivalency Protocol, WEP, is broken - not badly, but enough to make it unacceptable in environments where it is essential to have unbreakable security. The result is that there has been a rash of announcements of "our own special security system" by rival WiFi product makers. That broke the standard.

There are other holes, too; for example, if you try running Boingo's "find a hotspot" software, you'll discover that it uses "special features of specific WiFi cards" -it simply doesn't work on some which are fully WECA compliant.

The 75 WECA member companies' products which have been approved since March of 2000 are listed, together with the products which are approved, in today's press release.

The release also includes the following analysis:

"The rate of Wi-Fi Wireless LAN certifications continues to increase as additional product types like USB adapters are developed," says the association. "This certification rate is expected to continue to increase as additional product categories are created and Wi-Fi certifies other types of wireless LAN technology."

"This has been an absolutely amazing past two years," said Intersil's Dennis Eaton, WECA chairman. "The industry has gone from four companies offering a handful of Wi-Fi-certified products in April of 2000 to over seventy companies offering more than 300 products in nine categories. Even in high technology, where paradigm shifts are common, we believe that this is only the beginning of the impact that Wi-Fi and other WECA-supported technologies will have on the wireless world," continued Eaton.

"Wi-Fi has gone from an obscure technology to be considered, in some camps, as a replacement for 3G. Although WECA only sees Wi-Fi as a wireless LAN technology, it has certainly ignited the imagination of many people who see Wi-Fi as the unifying technology for people and organizations looking to stay connected through multiple mode cards consisting of Wi-Fi and one of several wireless WAN technologies," Eaton added.