News

Ratification stalls for WLAN's new 11g standard?

Despite heavy lobbying from Cisco, the new 802.11g standard - the Great White Hope of the 2.4 GHz wireless LAN lobby - looks to have got stalled in its ratification ballot.

The new technology runs at the same radio frequency as standard WiFi - 2.4GHz - but can run five times as fast. Accordingly, several large wireless networking corporations have bet a lot of the farm on seeing it ratified by the end of the year, and shipping before final ratification.

But the last IEEE working group meeting called for a letter ballot to approve the standard work done so far; and reports from inside this week's meeting suggest that it has failed to win the ballot.

An insider at the meeting told The NewsWireless Net that "negotiations are pretty frantic, and we're hoping that something can be sorted out before the meeting ends on Friday." But they conceded: "Right now, it has failed its letter ballot, and we may be back to another letter ballot if there isn't a miracle before the end of the week."