Even for a wireless-communications standard, the 802.11n specification has over the last several years been subject to an exceptionally messy development process. Battling vendors and standards proposals, predraft and postdraft 1.0 silicon and box products, and multiple interoperability issues have continued to plague this latest generation of Wi-Fi technology. The 802.11n spec is now mostly past the difficult stage and about to fulfill its promise: a range approximately twice as great and transmitting speeds five to 10 times as fast as those of legacy 802.11a/b/g products. It's about time, too, because the spec has a big job to do in designs for consumer, enterprise, campus, and metroscale markets. Unfortunately, the spec is complex and has a huge number of possible variants and options.

Those complexities are at least one reason that the process has taken so long. According to some industry participants, vendor infighting has been another major reason that the approval process has taken so long. Even before the IEEE committee approved Draft 1.0, at least three vendors had offered different proposals for the standard's core technology. TGn (Task Group N), the IEEE group that handles the spec, eventually narrowed down these competing proposals to two, says Jagdish Rebello, director and principal analyst of wireless communications for iSuppli. "Last year, [the two proposals] merged, and TGn submitted a joint proposal to the full body in May 2006." But TGn failed to achieve the necessary 75% approval level for a Draft 1.0 version. In March 2007, the committee voted to approve Draft 2.0, which came with approximately 3000 technical and editorial comments. Industry participants expect TGn to issue Draft 3.0 for a recirculation ballot this month, when the group expects to have completed the comment resolutions. As is usual for an IEEE standard, the specification will likely go through some more tweaking for another six to 12 months or so. The unprecedented number of options in this 802.11x spec makes this fine-tuning especially necessary, but participants agree that the mandatory sections are unlikely to change now.

During this lengthy, drawn-out process, at least one vendor coalition arose to develop an alternative specification so that products could more quickly get to market than the standards committee's work would support. In frustration at the length of time involved, manufacturers began releasing products even before Draft 1.0, based on different vendors? silicon designs. As tested by various external labs and research companies, many of these designs did not interoperate with each other.