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We have 802.11n standard WiFi, says Broadcom - "but not jumping the gun."

Broadcom didn't make it an official release, but at 3GSM, the company did publicly announce that the silicon they are now producing "is standard 802.11n compliant."

And warnings that there were "too few channels" for a dense population of WiFi access points were dismissed.

CTO Henry Samueli [above, left] made the statement at the launch of several other wireless products in Barcelona, raising the question of whether this was not a premature announcement - since the official ratification of the IEEE standards committee could be anything up to a year away.

Challenged, Samueli said that the new standard was almost 99% certain to follow the agreed draft. "All the details are in the draft," he said, "and we can be certain that if there are minor changes between now and ratification, we'll be able to cope with those in firmware."

Samueli said that fears that MIMO technology would cause a WiFi disaster were incorrect. "Yes, there aren't enough channels at 2.4 GHz," he agreed, "but 802.11n will work at 5 GHz too, where there are a lot more channels; and the standard means that the transmitter will look for a free channel."

He also dismissed a "a weak excuse" the claim allegedly made by Airgo (rival designer of WiFi gear) that the new standard wouldn't co-exist with earlier WiFi designs.

That claim was reported after Toms Networking labs found that a NetGear wireless using Airgo MIMOtechnology caused serious problems to 802.11g networks in the same area, on the same channel. The lab said that they showed their test results to Airgo, who blamed the failure on changes to the spec, forced by the Intel/Broadcom lobby.

The announcement steps up the original "we're ready" release back in January, when it used rather less emphatic language, saying "Broadcom . . .  announced the availability of its new Intensi-fi family of wireless LAN (WLAN) chipsets, the first solutions designed to comply with the IEEE 802.11n draft specification. "

Analysts have warned people to be cautious about buying products based on the draft 11n standard, which will not be finalised until next year at the earliest.

Samueli dismissed the warning as irrelevant, and said that "properly implemented" the draft standard would not cause the problems foreshadowed by the current Airgo chipset.

See also comment on UWB and WiFi

 Tags: 802.11n, Broadcom, Airgo