Philips Rushes to Wi-Fi with Draft-N

[Wayde]

Royal Philips Electronics just announced what might be a royal blunder for consumers. The Dutch electronics company cut a deal with French semiconductor manufacturer Metalink Ltd. The deal will give Philips access to Metalink's 802.11 draft-N chipsets for future wireless home theater devices. Philips plans to bring out a new line of wi-fi aware home theater products including HDTVs and set top boxes with built in high speed wi-fi. The enhanced bandwidth of draft-N using Metalink's new WLANPlus chipset will deliver MIMO technology that was adopted for 802.11n to deliver multiple HDTV streams to receiving Wi-Fi devices within 100 feet in the 5GHz band.

Philip Solis, senior analyst at ABI Research says: "We believe that in 2007, driven by the adoption of the 802.11n standard, Wi-Fi chipsets will be widely used by consumer electronics manufacturers for products such as HDTV displays and DVRs (Digital Video Recorders)"

Wireless home theater is a great idea that will eventually take off. The rush to put high definition ready wireless products on store shelves is tempting but Philips does consumers no favors bringing them out in the current draft-N iteration. 802.11n will be the next step in wireless protocols. Its enhanced bandwidth and speeds will be capable of multiple streams of high definition video and uncompressed multi-channel audio through MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) wireless feeds. But the new protocol must first be defined by the Wi-Fi Alliance (the technical body that defines wireless protocols) before it is considered complete. Products on store shelves right now calling themselves 802.11n are only "draft-N" or "pre-N", meaning they're only 802.11n inspired. Philips will hurt early adopters by using draft-N in expensive devices like set top boxes and HDTVs. It'll be bad enough when unlucky consumers have to replace a draft-N Linksys router when the real 802.11n protocol is released. But draft-N built into your next HDTV that won't connect to your 802.11n router will be just plain frustrating. Philips announcement to use draft-N arrives at the same time new draft-N problems were exposed.

Draft-N almost certainly won't be compatible with the final 802.11n protocol. Testing has already demonstrated troubles getting current draft-N products made by different manufacturers to communicate with each other. New information shows that draft-N routers will actually jam 802.11 b/g wireless signals.

The new problems discovered with some draft N equipment should technically make them illegal to operate under the guidelines of the FCC. Interoperability and interference tests were conducted with various draft-N routers using all the major chipsets available today. It seems draft-N routers using chipsets by Airgo, Broadcom and Marvell not only had problems communicating with 802.11 b/g routers at high speeds but would jam their transmissions. The problem was most serious using routers featuring the Airgo chipset and was described as "obliterating any 802.11 b/g router in the vicinity". Although present, interference problems were less significant using Broadcom and Marvell based routers. To be fair, no routers using the Metalink chipset that Philips will use had been tested. But you'll probably have to use Philip's own Metalink based routers. It would be very difficult to get one device to work with all the conflicting draft-N products on the market today. The need for faster wireless technologies and appetite for buying so called "future proof" technologies will prompt unwary consumers to buy products they don't realize aren't ready.

Getting out of the jam.

The best advice for someone wishing to prevent being jammed by noisy neighborhood routers using the wireless draft-N would be to upgrade to 802.11a at 5GHz. The 2.4 - 2.5GHz bands are getting overcrowded with interference and are best avoided.

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[toecheese]

I doubt this to be much of an issue- most pre-N products are meant to be flashed to whatever the final standard is- the same thing happened with -g before it came out.