1. Wireless happenings

The first "real" day of Comdex had more activity than I expected. The activity level feels higher than last year's - at least it did today (Monday). But some of this could be due to the show management's decision to have everyone trudge the length of the Convention Center in order to reach the Registration area. Whether things hold up Tuesday will be the real test.

As far as the reported qualified-attendees-only-everyone-else-pays-$50 policy is concerned, I suspect the rules are being at least bent - with the legions of seniors with shopping bags trolling for freebies replaced by much younger equivalents.

Some of the more interesting things I've seen are in wireless-enabled products vs. the boring old wireless LAN data products that I normally cover. I'll cover those and other fun stuff in tomorrow's wrap-up report, and instead turn to the "he said, she said" contest that's developing between wireless chipmakers Broadcom and Atheros.

The short story is that Broadcom is asserting that Atheros' Super-G based products will interfere with neighboring 802.11g networks, severly limiting the 11g network's speed. I've seen Broadcom's demo - which uses a video streamed via Broadcom 11g equipment and a second WLAN using NETGEAR WGT624 108Mbps router and WG511T 108Mbps Cardbus card - , received their PowerPointed pitch and also have spoken with Atheros about Broadcom's assertion.

Rather than feed the buzz any further at this point, I'll just say that I'm reserving judgement until I do my own testing, the results of which will be shared with Broadcom, Atheros and NETGEAR before being published.

I also spent some time with Agere Systems discussing their plans to get back into the WLAN game. Like other WLAN players, Agere sees "media connectivity" as a prime opportunity and their 11a/b/g WaveLAN Multimode product [related story ] as the key means. Multimode devices are currently sampling and Agere plans to be in volume production in Q1 2004.

They are still working on the MIMO technology that they announced atlast year's Comdex, and hope to have IEEE-standards-based product in 2005 - if the standards effort doesn't degrade into squabbling among rival factions before then, as UWB's has.

Although not officially at the show, SanDisk and SyChip got in touch to discuss the disappointing throughput results in my recent review of SanDisk's SDIO Wi-Fi card and update me on other things that both companies have been up to. SyChip pointed the finger at the slow SDIO implementation on the HP H2210 iPAQ that was used for testing and gave me some background to back it up. They'll be sending me another vendor's PocketPC, which they said would make a big difference in throughput. I'll be re-running my tests and will update the review with the results I'm done.

They've also been working on a new driver that will support WPA , Cisco Compatible Extensions (CCX), and let you use their very nice client application on PPC 2003 devices. The exact release date hasn't been set, but they are hoping for some time in Q1 2004.