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Intel smuggles first 50 megabit wireless LAN products into Europe for testing

High speed is on the way! With luck, British wireless users could be running local area networks at 50 kilobits per second in the New Year - and at quite reasonable prices.

Five times faster than the fastest existing wireless LAN devices, Intel's fastest type of wireless network - already shipping in the US - has arrived in the UK, ready for testing and - hopefully - approval by the authorities.

"We haven't had a chance to switch this box on, yet," said a pleased David Bradshaw, marketing boss of Intel's wireless operation in Europe,

Bradshaw isn't yet sure of what UK pricing levels he'll be able to set. "Based on US prices, I'd expect the access point to cost around 300 pounds sterling, while the PC Card client device for notebooks should cost around a hundred pounds," he offered.

At those prices, there's no obvious reason why anybody would choose the current WiFi standard over this new one - except that it isn't yet legal to buy the new one.

Key to approval of the new standard, IEEE 802.11a (note the letter "a" - it's important!) is a political battle, going on behind the scenes, between the European radio authorities, and the American innovators.

The users of mobile IT hardware all want more speed. The new 11a standard carries 50 megabits of data per second, which makes it five times faster than the established 11b WiFi standard, with a max of 11 megabits at the moment.

This new standard is destined to be called WiFi5.

However, in Europe, the 5 GHz wireless waveband is intended for a high speed public networking protocol called Hiperlan II, which is not yet ready for launch. And so, the authorities are stalling as much as possible, hoping to slow down adoption of the 11a standard by placing obstacles in the way of getting it approved, and thus allowing Hiperlan II to have a chance of getting up and running.

The need for speed is particularly acute for corporate wireless users. Today's WiFi standard is just fine for an individual user, most of the time - for tasks like logging onto Web sites. But corporate network managers have to back up the data on individual PCs, storing it on central servers; and there's an awful lot of data on the typical PC.

At 11 megabits per second, the typical PC hard drive takes a long time to back up. But more crucially, while it is being backed up, that solid stream of data, pouring off the disk onto the server, blocks up the wireless bands for everybody else.

Two sticking points currently enable European authorities to prohibit the user of 11a networks. First, is the question of dynamic frequency selection (DFS) which allows existing 5 GHz waveband users to carry on as normal, by switching the 11a device to channels on a different frequency when they spot interference. And then there's power management; the European authorities have decided that it's important that WiFi5 should be able to operate the way cellphones do - and reduce the power levels when they are close together.

Until these issues are resolved, the electrical safety CE Mark won't be issued for 11a devices - even though there's no suggestion that they would be unsafe without them.