Just when we thought that we were finally progressing smoothly with the 802.11n draft specification, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) drops a bomb on us. A second draft was due for the 802.11n standard by late fall of this year, but will likely appear in January of next year instead.

Part of the delay comes from the vast number of comments – over 12,000 in all -- that have been recorded as a result of the draft 1.0 spec that was announced in late January. Since that time, a number of manufacturers have released wireless products built around the standard. Companies like Dell and Acer have even announced notebooks which use draft standard 802.11n wireless cards. And with the string of product releases comes many issues that have been encountered over the past seven months. Things were really bad when eWeek first tested 802.11n gear back in April. Problems cropped up with legacy performance with "G" networks, poor performance at longer ranges and routers were having issues keeping a connection with wireless clients. When eWeek did its second round of testing in July, things were getting much better with new 802.11n draft products that entered the market. The main problems with products tested at that time were compatibility issues with wireless devices using different wireless chipsets. ARNet reports:

"The initial crop of products have 'bad neighbor' characteristics in early tests," says Rolf De Vegt, senior director of business development at Airgo Networks, the first chipmaker to come out with a MIMO chipset, nearly 18 months ago. That means MIMO products can step on other WLAN transmissions and that MIMO products from different vendors don't work together well. Other issues, says De Vegt, include deciding on what form of transmit beam forming to use, and Power Save Multi-polling, which is a technique to conserve power on handheld wireless devices by coordinating scheduled activity on the radio link, instead of randomly sending and receiving.

Although it's possible that the second draft would be completed by January of 2007, ARNet reports that the final 802.11n standard might not be ratified until early 2008. We wonder how this move will play for Intel which had planned to incorporate a finalized 802.11n spec as a part of its next generation Santa Rosa notebook platform.