Broadcom claims first 'official' 802.11n wireless chips

Company says its version complies with 'all but nailed down' spec

Guy Kewney, at 3GSM, Barcelona, Personal Computer World 16 Feb 2006

The battle between Airgo and its rival Wifi chip providers reached new levels of confusion at 3GSM when Broadcom unofficially - but publicly – announced: ‘We have the first 802.11n chips.’

The statement, by CTO Henry Samueli, came during an impressive round of Broadcom product releases, including some startling breakthroughs - such as more than doubling the power gain between antenna and phone chip with the Cellairity product announcement.

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 told PCW that he was not jumping the gun on the 11n standard . 'The fact is that the spec is all but nailed down, and we can be 99 per cent certain that our implementation is the one that the IEEE will go with, and will be what the Wifi standard for multiple-input multiple-output will become,' he said.

The announcement is a gesture of defiance after a year of obscure political wrangling amongst various lobby groups anxious to get their own pet design approved – especially after Airgo had said its own design would be the one.

The argument became more heated recently when a major technical test of the Airgo Mimo design in a Netgear wireless router showed major 'killer' faults, which Airgo said were caused by it being forced to adopt an inferior design to comply with IEEE standards.

The tests, by Toms Networking, showed that if the Netgear RM240 router was set up on channel six when another older 802.11g network was already operating, it would squash the legacy signal.

At the time, Airgo told Toms Networking: ‘The reason has to do with fundamental design decisions that were made long ago with regard to the technology to be used in 802.11n, that resulted in the requirement for 40MHz of contiguous band.

‘The result is that the Primary and Secondary channels for 802.11n 2.4GHz band operation will always be separated by four channels, i.e. 1P + 5S, 8P + 4S, 11P + 7S, etc.

'This means that even with an 802.11n WLan channel forced to 1 or 11, there will be enough channel overlap from the 40MHz of occupied bandwidth to pretty much slow a legacy WLan on channel 6 to a crawl, to just a few Mbits/sec of throughput.'

Samueli described this as ‘a weak excuse’ and said a properly designed 802.11n Mimo wireless would simply not have this effect.

He also dismissed fears that the enhanced range of 11n would mean impossible congestion.

‘With dual-frequency Mimo, you can choose between 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and just search for a free channel,’ said Samueli.

‘There will be plenty of free channels, even with the added range and, more importantly, if the 11n design can't find a free channel it will power back to avoid congestion.’

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