WiFi Alliance predicts deeper ‘n’ penetration

One week after the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers approved the long-awaited final 802.11n standard, the WiFi Alliance is readying its certification juggernaut to certify millions of newly and fully compliant next-generation WiFi devices as well as allow its membership to attach the new ‘N’ moniker to the million already in the market.

WiFi Alliance marketing director Kelly Davis-Felner said the final standard puts to bed a seven-year process to create a faster wireless LAN service, which put the Alliance in an odd position of certifying products before there was a standard. When it became apparent in 2006 that it would take several years to dot the final ‘i’ in the new faster, wider range 802.11standard, the Alliance agreed to begin certifying devices under the IEEE’s latest draft. The result was an onslaught of pre-certified ‘Draft N’ devices. Davis-Felner said the Alliance certified 400 million WiFi devices in 2008, about 100 million of which were Draft N devices.

All of those devices can now be marketed under the WiFi banner as fully N-compliant, but any new devices or any devices that use new capabilities in the standard developed after Draft N will have to go back to the Alliance starting Sept. 30 for a new stamp of approval, Davis-Felner said. Now that the final standard is in place, the Alliance is expecting a new wave of products to be submitted to the forum. Most of the initial submissions were for routers, and the end-user devices tended to be laptops or other pricier electronics purchases, but the Alliance now expects 802.11n to penetrate deep into the consumer electronics categories, Davis-Felner said.

“In three or four years, we’re not going to be talking about 802.11a/b/g anymore,” Davis-Felner said. “The only thing you’ll see those technologies in will be thermostats and other super-low power devices.”

Of consumer devices, cellphones will likely be among the last holdouts to receive N chips due to their tight power budgets. While some smartphones at the high-end might differentiate themselves with N chips, few will be able to support N’s boost in speed and range without draining their batteries. Those that do emerge will likely support only single-stream, which can’t take advantage of the new standard’s multiple antenna technologies. “Most phones are throttled by the capabilities of their operating systems, which it makes it impossible to take advantage of 100 Mb/s of capacity,” Davis-Felner said. “It’s a non-issue.

Eventually phones will also sport the new WiFi standard, even if they can’t take advantage of its full capabilities. Prices for N chipsets have dropped significantly since the first draft N products emerged. At $7 to $8 a chipset, they’re nearing the $4 to $5 price of a/b/g silicon. When those prices converge, they’ll effectively take over the market except in all but a few extreme power-sensitivity cases, Davis-Felner said.