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Cisco's version of WiFi 11n trashed, as it "sells" to Duke University

It was meant to be a wonderful PR coup: Cisco and Duke University announced a deal for "the world's biggest 802.11n wireless LAN" - a deal which was intended to cement Cisco's version of 11n as the gold standard.

Cisco had a strong incentive to smooth things over with Duke University. Go back to July last year, and you may be fascinated to find that the two bodies were duking it out (ha ha) over a small problem of a broken WiFi network. "iPhones swamp Duke University hot spots" said the headlines.

The chief information officer for Duke University has issued an explanation of the service outages recently caused by iPhones. According to Tracy Futhey's official statement, the problem was caused by a "Cisco-based network issue".

You can almost hear the PR department bouncing into action. A plan was formulated! -has it worked? Heck, no...

"Duke University is spending millions on 802.11n half-baked WiFi technology," Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of e-Week.com began. "It's too bad that 802.11n still isn't a real standard."

And Steven V-N then laid into the concept of buying an unfinished standard - one which, he insists, won't work properly:

What we have today is the 802.11n Draft 2 'standard.' This is not a final standard. It's also not a standard that works between vendors. So, if I come on to the Duke campus with my Apple MacBook Pro, there's no guarantee that it's going to work at 1T 802.11n speeds with Duke's newly installed Cisco Aironet 1250 Series AP-based WLAN (Wireless LAN). Oh, the MacBook, a Dell, a Lenovo, or whatever laptop you happen to have with an 802.11n card, will work. But it will work by falling back to 802.11g. I'm not sure that at a list price of $1,299 per 1250 unit, I'm really spending my network money well. After all, if I want 802.11g's theoretical maximum speed of 54M bps, I could buy a decent 802.11g AP, say Cisco's own Linksys WAP54G Wireless-G Access Point for about $70.

"The school launched a limited pilot of the 1250 last fall, consistently achieving 130Mbps for 11n clients. Because of the multi-antenna technology (called MIMO) in 11n, even existing 802.11g clients saw a big jump in throughput, almost double their previous data rate when connected to the existing campus WLAN."

There have been neutral reports. The nicest so far came from Nick Farrell, who remarked: "The network will cover six million square feet of central North Carolina blanketed in WiFi," and ended feebly: "Cisco is claiming that it will be the largest planned 802.11n wireless network in the world by any organisation, which is nice." See? It says "nice".

And Cisco seems to have tamed the sometimes-sceptical Engadget, who managed to find a nice piccy of the University on a Yahoo page, and limited comment to "Watch out, Dukies - we hear those folks in Chapel Hill have a thing for swiping unsecured signals."

Duke officials said they are not installing the technology "for technology’s sake," but expect it to benefit students and faculty for academic and research purposes as well as improve student life.

Cisco's official release gives the official line. Does this mention the ongoing IP lawsuits between the IEEE gang and the Australian CSIRO body? No, strangely, it does not.

But Steve Vaughan-Nichols does:

Specifically, CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization), a research group sponsored by the Australian government, has not signed off on 802.11n.

I don't expect them to either. CSIRO has aggressively defended its patents against Wi-Fi vendors, such as Buffalo Technology, and I don't see them co-operating with the IEEE. Especially when you consider that, when I last checked, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, HP and Netgear are all suing CSIRO to get those patents overturned. Those companies are, of course, also members of the IEEE task force trying to get 802.11n officially blessed and out the door.

 
As he summarises: if you were the guy in charge of telling the CFO why you were spending all this money on unproven tech which Cisco is apparently sponsoring Duke to debug for it, what would you actually say?