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Dell to offer Broadcom 802.11a/g card

$69 mini-PCI upgrade

Broadcom has begun shipping what it claims is the first mini-PCI card to support both standard 802.11a and draft spec. 802.11g wireless networking for notebooks.

Dell, for one, will today offer the three-chip card as an optional extra for certain Latitude notebooks, Broadcom said. It will offer the card as a $69 upgrade. It already offers Broadcom's two-chip 802.11g card as a free upgrade.

Seventy dollars, claims Broadcom, is exceptional value for future-proof technology. The draft 802.11g spec. is inherently compatible with today's 802.11b WLANs. Support for 802.11g, expected to be ratified as a standard in June, delivers higher data throughput in the same 2.4GHz band as 802.11b.

Actual network performance is rather lower than 802.11g's raw data maximum of 54Mbps, but it's still better than 802.11b, and buyers are turning to the new spec. for that reason. 802.11a is better still, operating in the uncrowded 5GHz band, but isn't compatible with 802.11b.

Broadcom believes corporates will ultimately choose 802.11a, but this year expects sales of 802.11g-based products to outsell 802.11a-based units five to one. That ratio will start shifting to favour 802.11a next year in high performance network environments.

That leaves consumers pursuing 802.11g as a faster version of their existing 802.11b networks. The irony is that with Internet feeds at best a couple of megabits per second, for most homes 802.11b is more than adequate. It takes the need to beam a lot of large files around - or regular Quake LAN parties - to necessitate an upgrade.

Still, buyers are likely to get 802.11g thrust in their faces over the coming year, particularly once the standard is ratified. Low- or no-cost upgrades may sound appealing, but the likes of Dell will make their money back (and then some) flogging unnecessary 802.11g base-station upgrades.

For businesses, it won't just be higher performance that's offered as a teaser, but greater security. In Broadcom's case, that's support for Cisco Compatible Extensions (CCX), plus WPA, and AES encryption and WEP, both bases for the upcoming 802.11i wireless security standard. ®

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