I can personally say that neither Buffalo Tech nor Linksys will have review product waiting for me when I return home from the show, and I'd be very surprised if I had something in hand by December, or even mid-December! And from what I hear, Linksys' "first week of December ship date" just ain't gonna happen.

My take is that Broadcom is pushing the envelope with what is clearly a bid to grab market share and get into the WLAN game, risking alienating both the Wi-Fi Alliance and IEEE. Publically, the Alliance has been quiet and has not issued any formal statement on Broadcom's 54g push, but one would think that behind the scenes Broadcom is getting taken to the woodshed.

I'm also not sure that rushing 802.11g into the mix will really get the expected bump in sales, anyway, at least not from the home-user who already has 802.11b products. Those folks already know that range is a larger problem than speed, and 11g isn't going to help give them coverage in weak-signal locations. And wait until 11g upgraders learn that one 11b client will slow throughput significantly for 11g clients, and that the effect gets worse with each additional 11b client. Are that many people really ready to dump all of their 11b stuff on Ebay and buy an all-new 11g WLAN?

But putting all this soap-opera and competitive posturing aside, the only real products that have been announced are coming from Linksys and Buffalo Technology. Linksys is dubbing their offerings the "Wireless-G" line and include the WAP54G Access Point, WRT54G Wireless Router, and WPC54G Notebook Adapter, all of which will allegedly be available in December (in time for your holiday shopping pleasure!) and be priced about $10 more than their 802.11b-only equivalents, which would put them around $100-$120 for the Access Point and Router and $65-$75 for the card if you shop on-line.