Wi-Fi Alliance cracks down on ‘standards-plus’ kit

Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2004/07/30/wifi_standards_plus_crackdown/

Better late than never

Posted in Networks, 30th July 2004 13:39 GMT

The Wi-Fi Alliance is rather belatedly seeking to crack down on ‘standards-plus’ products that achieve extended speed or range through proprietary add-ons, yet still claim to be fully interoperable. The Alliance has threatened to remove its certification from any product that interferes with another Wi-Fi product.

The action is intended to prevent the erosion of confidence in the certification process, which has been seen in the enterprise market as pre-standard or extended products have hit the markets. It also aims to deter vendors from engaging in prolonged claims and counterclaims over interference, such as the battle between Broadcom and Atheros over their 802.11g-plus chips last year.

Such disputes win publicity for the vendors that use the technology but also confuse the market and confirm the scepticism that businesses already have about Wi-Fi interoperability.

However, the Alliance’s action raises the wider issue of whether standards bodies and their certification authorities can retain control in a market where competition is fierce, with technology vendors always seeking differentiation through the next new feature; and where customers are genuinely demanding a rapid pace of change, rather than having it thrust upon them. In such an environment, the standards process needs to be faster and more flexible if it is not to be discredited, or hijacked by a few vendors seeking to achieve interoperability and mass markets through de facto technologies.

The dilemma has been highlighted most painfully in the IEEE battle over the UltraWideBand-based 802.15.3a proposals, but is also affecting Wi-Fi as the WLan chipmakers -race to leapfrog one another in speed and range and so attract the all-important mass market wireless vendors such as Linksys.

Too little too late?

This makes the Alliance’s threat too little too late for the consumer sector that most of the standards-plus products target. The experience of 802.11g – when Broadcom stole huge market share by launching pre-standard gear last year – showed that consumers are more interested in performance than standards. The success of Broadcom’s controversial gamble has since encouraged its rivals also to try to grab a headstart as new technologies emerge, promising products that add more and more Mbps to the basic specifications of 802.11g, and starting to hint at prestandard devices for the upcoming 802.11n (108Mbps Wi-Fi) and 802.11e (quality of service).

It is likely that consumers – though not enterprises – will buy such products for their superior performance, regardless of future compatibility, making home-oriented vendors indifferent to the Wi-Fi Alliance’s kitemarks – some already ship kit without these stamps. This is especially true in the growing digital home networks market, where quality of service and high rates will be important for video streaming.

To remove a few more teeth from the Alliance, several surveys have shown that US consumers, in particular, regard Wi-Fi as a generic term for wireless, not a certification, and that they are more aware of the Centrino brand and logo than with the term Wi-Fi – and often interchange the two.

For those that are worried about the Alliance policies, the body says it will withhold or even revoke certification if is sees any interference issues during testing, or during subsequent investigations as a result of vendor or user complaints. The problem is likely to increase as chipmakers start to launch pre-802.11n products. Atheros says it is considering such a product, and Broadcom and Conexant hinted at the same course of action earlier this year. Atheros’ moves:

Last November, Broadcom claimed that it had test results to prove that Atheros’ Super G Turbo Mode, which extends the rate and range of 802.11g, interfered with nearby Wi-Fi networks and dramatically degraded their performance. Atheros denied this but did adjust its channel bonding technique, the supposed cause of the problem, to make it dynamic and eliminate the risk.

But it certainly has not pulled back from its attempts to make up for being caught offguard last year by Broadcom’s early leap into 802.11g. Its latest leap is to promise pre-standard 802.11e functionality using smart antennas, targeting the buoyant digital home market.

The forthcoming 802.11e specification adds quality of service features to Wi-Fi and is vital for voice over WLan and video applications. This makes it important to the most buoyant growth market for Wi-Fi chips, the digital media home. This is the area Atheros will target with its AR50005VA chipset, which is claims is the first “standards compliant” silicon to incorporate the fashionable MIMO (Multiple In Multiple Out) smart antenna technique.

The dual-band 802.11a/b/g device will support multiple DVDquality links of 6-8Mbps each, or a combination of HDTV (19- 24Mbps) and DVD links, over homes up to 550 square meters in area. It will also offer support for the draft specification of 802.11e, though any changes in the standard before finalization could make kit based on the current silicon immediately obsolete, or non-interoperable with newer products.

Signal intent

Atheros’ implementation of smart antennas, which it calls VLocity, is based on up to four antennas. It uses beam forming techniques for transmission – using dual OFDM baseband processors and radios to focus an intense burst of energy towards the receiver, extending data rate and range. At the receiver end, ‘receive combining’ processes signals from up to four antennas to extend range and improve message quality. Atheros claims these two approaches combined “increase the effective signal up to tenfold”.

VLocity is compatible with legacy WLAN devices and with Atheros’ own Super-G and Super-AG technologies, the company claims. It also says that there will be a performance benefit even if AR5005VA products are used at only one end of the link. The chipmaker stated these claims repeatedly, clearly sensitive about the charges that its proprietary Super-G silicon used to cause interference with standard Wi-Fi kit.

The new chipset is available in two- and four-antenna configurations and volume production will start in autumn. Atheros and NEC are demonstrating an Audio Video wireless module, which incorporates the AR5005VA chipset and NEC Electronics' MPEG2 encoder/decoder boards. It supports guidelines from the Digital Living Networking Alliance, a body focused on digital home standards, in areas such as digital rights management. Atheros has recently become very interested in MIMO. It is leading one of two main groups battling it out within the IEEE to control the upcoming 802.11n standard for 100Mbps-plus Wi-Fi.

Its proposal rests on MIMO combined with wide 40MHz bands, while the rival group, which includes Broadcom, is also focused on smart antennas, but using advanced coding rather than doublewidth bands to boost performance. A third proposal has been entered by Agere, using MIMO with either single or double bands and a larger number of antennas.

Analysts at the Linley Group says shipments of Wi-Fi chips will grow to 100m in 2005, double the 2003 figure.

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