3. 802.11g on speed

If there's one thing that WLAN chip and product makers have learned in the past year, it's that neither standards nor Wi-Fi certification mean squat to Mr. and Ms wireless LAN consumer. What does matter is the number in the "starburst" on the front of the product box - whether the 22Mbps (now 44, or is it 54Mbps?) of the 802.11b+ plus mania that first showed that speed could be a market-share shifter, or the current 54Mbps (5 times faster!!!!) draft-11g frenzy. As if wireless LAN equipment vendors aren't throwing enough new twists at a market that apparently don't need no steenking standards before eagerly slapping down their credit cards in their frenzied quest for higher throughput, it appears that they've only just begun.

Although we're still a month or so from 802.11g certification, WLAN chip makers are already launching speed-focused tweaks. Intersil was first with its "Nitro" technology, but this week Atheros countered by announcing its "Super G" and "Super A/G" enhancements.

Nitro is primarily aimed at offsetting the inefficiency that results from mixed 802.11b / g networks. Picture a conversation between a slow (11b) and fast (11g) talker in which each person speaks the same sentence in turn and is given the same amount of time to speak it, and you'll realize that the fast speaker spends most of the time waiting. Change the rules to allow the fast talker to say as much as possible in the allotted time, and that's the gist of packet bursting and the essence of Intersil's Nitro, which Intersil says can triple the throughput of 11g devices in mixed b/g networks and give a 50% throughput boost in 11g-only WLANs.

Atheros' "Super" tweaks take packet bursting, adds their multi-channel "Turbo" technology for 802.11a and g modes, throws in activation of an adaptive Lempel ZIV on-chip compression engine (think on-the-fly "zip" / " un-zip" of transferred data), tops it off with "dynamic transmit and modulation optimizations" (snazzier signal processing), for what Atheros says can deliver 90Mbps TCP/IP best case throughput.

Although both Intersil and Atheros emphasize the backward compatibility and standards-compliant / based nature of their enhancements, we'll just have to wait and see how much enhancement the average user actually experiences and how much compatibility they really get. And where is Broadcom - the guys who started the whole draft-11g street brawl? In an ironic turn-about, they told me that they're saving any announcements about 11g performance enhancements until after the standard is ratified next month, preferring not to confuse the market so close to 11g's ratification!

With the wireless standard hi-jinks out of the way, let me turn to some of the new and interesting stuff I found during my show floor walking.