We’ve heard the promises for years now. As they go, soon there will be two new wireless technologies, one for local area networks and one for personal area networks, that will ensure speeds fast enough to truly network a home. 802.11n and ultra wideband, while more than a glimmer in an engineer’s eye, have been more talked about than produced. But in 2006 industry players from both camps say that will change.
802.11n
802.11n is the next member of the 802.11 WLAN family. Backward compatible with 802.11g/b/a, the technology aims to increase network speed and reliability and to extend the operating distance of wireless networks. Raw data throughput is expected to reach as much as 600Mbps, or more than 10 times the throughput of 802.11g, allowing for seamless data and video streaming throughout the home. At the core of the technology is MIMO (multiple input, multiple output), which uses multiple antennas at both the transmitter source and the receiver destination to minimize errors and optimize data speed.
The specification is currently on the IEEE floor – as it has been for some time now – and is up for vote again in January. The original 34 prospective standards were whittled down to two last year, TGn Sync and WWiSE, each of which had big-name backers. A joint proposal team (JPT) was then set up within the IEEE to combine the two. But come October of this year, that number climbed to three, as some major industry players formed the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC). Starting off with 27 companies – including Apple, Atheros, Broadcom, Cisco, Conexant, Intel, Sony and Toshiba – the consortium has now grown to hold nearly 50 companies, the latest of which is European powerhouse STMicroelectronics.
The group’s aim, as described by Athero’s CTO, Bill McFarland, is to speed the industry’s transition to 802.11n. “Progress was fairly slow. One of the things that happened was companies that were interested in seeing progress a little more quickly, joined together and formed the enhanced wireless consortium,” he said.
“The joint proposal was taking a long time to progress – for the first few months it was supposed to be in existence, it never actually met – and when it started meeting, all the time was spent arguing about how the voting would be done,” McFarland continued. “Then when they decided to start working, they decided they needed to start from scratch, a blank sheet, and have separate motions and votes on every individual technical item. This guaranteed that it was going to take a long time. EWC offered a different approach in getting an 802.11n standard. Both organizations are working toward the same goal.”
Airgo, a major wireless player whose MIMO designs are already widely in use but that is not a member of the EWC, openly disagrees, claiming that the group’s involvement on the IEEE proceeds will indeed slow the process down.
“Kind of out of right field came this Enhanced Wireless Consortium with the stated objective of speeding an 802.11n standard. In reality, at a minimum, it slowed things down, because the joint [TGn Sync-WWiSE] proposal was ready to present a draft to the IEEE in November,” said David Borison, director of product management, Airgo. “Because of the disruption, that didn’t happen. At a minimum, there’s a two month delay if a proposal gets voted in in January.”
Borison further claimed that the consortium’s effort came about “to delay the market and stop Airgo” from continuing to gain market share.
Atheros’ McFarland disagreed. “[There are] a lot of rumors and odd statements about the EWC organization. The organization is a very open organization, anyone can join,” he said. “It has only two goals: to accelerate the adoption of the 802.11n standard, and to ensure that advanced wireless LAN devices are interoperable.”
Oyster Bay, N.Y.-based ABI Research also disagrees with the idea that the EWC’s goal is to slow the process or hijack the IEEE. “It looks as if the EWC's proposals and the existing 'joint proposal' dovetail well," said senior analyst Sam Lucero, "and we hear that a draft standard may appear as early as January."
As for this hurting Airgo, Lucero said, "They say that they have all the fundamental technical pieces to do what EWC is recommending. But they had a good 18 to 24 month lead on the rest of the market in terms of pushing this MIMO-based technology out. Suddenly that has been erased. If EWC's proposals are accepted, tiny Airgo will be up against Atheros, Marvell, Intel and others."
Borison disputed that the company will not lose its lead. Instead, he said, Airgo will continue its development. “From our perspective, no matter what proposal wins, we’re fine with it,” he said. “The faster the market moves to .11n, the stronger our position is. I think what you’ll see is a round of pre-n products while we are busy launching our .11n-compliant products.”
Airgo, Atheros and ABI all expect 802.11n products to begin to proliferate with consumers in 2006.
“2006 is going to be the first year of .11n. You’ll see a lot of products hit the market and a strong adoption from consumers. Things grow over time … but it will be a major factor in the wireless LAN market next year,” McFarland said.
UWB
Sometimes seen as an 802.11n competitor because of its targeting of media content, ultra wideband (UWB) is also expected to take greater hold in the wireless market in 2006. The two technologies are similar in several ways. Neither has a fully approved IEEE standard; both run at exceptionally high throughputs, and both are seeing major support from top industry brands.
UWB is a personal arena network (PAN) technology for transmitting large amounts of digital data over a wide spectrum of frequency bands with very low power for a short distance. Anticipated early applications include the exchange of media content over high-data, portable consumer electronics devices including MP3 players, digital cameras, printers/scanners, home-theater equipment, personal computers and video gaming platforms.
Like 802.11n, UWB does not have an industry blessed standard as of yet. But progress has been made. The WiMedia Alliance – an industry group that counts Intel, Microsoft, Sony and Texas Instruments among its members – in August began working with Ecma International to establish the WiMedia multiband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) UWB radio platform as the global UWB standard, which supports a data rate of 480Mbps and beyond and got a thumbs up from the Federal Communications Commission in March. Earlier this month, WiMedia announced the Ecma International standard for UWB technology, based on the WiMedia technology. Ecma will submit the standard to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for fast track approval.
MB-OFDM competes with direct sequence Ultra-Wideband (DS-UWB), for which Freescale is the largest backer. The UWB Forum member plans to push the 230-foot-range, low-power networking technology to 1Gbps by Q3 2006 and, despite lack of an IEEE-blessed standard, has taken its UWB and joined it with fellow short-range technology Bluetooth. The company hosted a demonstration of high data rate UWB silicon operating under existing Bluetooth software stacks at WiCon Americas in October, leveraging partners Open Interface and Frontline Test Equipment to stream UWB signals using Bluetooth protocols and track the protocols via an analyzer.
U.K.-based CSR also has plans to marry its Bluetooth technology with UWB. The company said last month that it wants to combine Bluetooth with UWB in products ready for the second half of 2007.
Further, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group reaffirmed its interest in UWB this month. The group has been working on combining Bluetooth and UWB since May and the specification is set for introduction in the first part of 2007 with prototyping following in the latter part of 2007.
Both DS-UWB and MB-OFDM backers are confident that next year will see UWB products reach realization in the consumer marketplace.
“2006 looks great for UWB. This will be the year UWB takes off,” said Martin Rofheart, director of the UWB operation at Freescale.
Bryce Leach, UWB software development manager at TI, agreed. “You should see, within WiMedia, the start of the infrastructure built around interoperability, products beginning to show up on shelves and solutions from multiple providers. You should start to see products, but also the competitive marketplace pick up.”
Competition
Neither Freescale or TI believes 802.11n will continue to be seen as competition for UWB next year. The two technologies have more differences than their crashing similarities, with each side supporting its technologies' benefits.
“There are no technologies that compete head-to-head with ultra wideband,” said Leach. “802.11n, while it will be a higher data rate, is targeted at a slightly different market, data networking. And, if you look at MIMO, for a small mobile device, placing the antennas such that you gain the performance gains of MIMO will be a challenge.”
Atheros’ McFarland added, “I don’t think UWB will be in that strong of a market position in the timeframe of 802.11n. Maybe longer term, down the road, but we are talking about launching pretty soon and I don’t think UWB will be something that is common at that time.” Beyond that, WLAN already has an established presence in homes, workplaces and coffee shops across the world, he concluded.
