DailyTech reported a month ago that Dell was scheduled to use the 802.11n draft standard in its notebooks starting in Q3. Well, today the company is launching its Dell Wireless 1500 Draft 802.11n dual-band wireless card. The wireless cards will be available in select XPS and Inspiron notebooks systems.

According to Dell, when connected to a complimenting Intensi-fi equipped router, the notebooks will be capable of transferring data at a maximum of 270Mbps compared to 54Mbps for traditional 802.11g based notebooks. To ensure fewer headaches for consumers and business customers alike, the Dell Wireless 1500 card is backwards compatible with 802.11b, 802.11g and 802.11a wireless standards. The $59 card uses technology based on the 1.0 draft of the IEEE 802.11n specification and is equipped with a Multi-Input, Multi-Output (MIMO) antenna system.

Early testing has shown draft standard 802.11n products to offer a maximum throughput of 112Mbps and are highly sensitive to surrounding legacy networks. When in company with existing 802.11b/g networks, performance has been shown to drop to around 40Mbps and in some cases a wireless connection is lost altogether. Being that the Dell 1500 Wireless card is built on Broadcom Intensi-fi technology, it will be firmware upgradeable to the final 802.11n spec which should alleviate most if not all of the early teething problems.