802.11n factions close in on compromise

It still may take a couple of meetings before proponents of differing 802.11n Wi-Fi standard proposals produce a first-draft specification, but balloting held in an IEEE working group meeting this week confirmed that backers of the TGnSync and WWISE proposals are still on track on a compromise between their ideas.

In the initial down selection vote involving working group members, TGnSync was marginally favored 53% to 47% for WWISE. However, in the following confirmation vote, TGnSync received only 56% support from the group, far short of the 75% needed for any proposal to be confirmed as the first-draft standard.

Proponents of the two proposals now will work to figure out how to merge them into a single concept, with the next vote likely to come at a working group meeting in May or July, according to a spokeswoman for Airgo Networks, the company whose Multiple Input/Multiple Output technology is the common ground between the proposals from TgnSync and WWISE groups.

The 802.11n working group is developing the specification for how--and by how much--Wi-Fi bandwidth will exceed the 54 Mb/s described in the 802.11g standard. TGnSync supports a two-antenna, 40-Mhz channel architecture capable of 243 Mb/s (600 Mb/s when four antennas are used). WWISE is backing a two-antenna configuration using 20-Mhz channels (540 Mb/s with four antennas). Numerous industry vendors back both concepts, though just last week, Nokia switched its support from TGnSync to WWISE.