Watch out for the draft

Stand firm and don't be tempted to jump on the draft 802.11ac standard too soon, warns James Harris

The next generation wireless networking standard - 802.11ac - is already being talked about. Do not leap into this too soon. While 802.11ac is going to support much faster throughput than 802.11n, of up to 3.47Gbps compared to N's 600Mbps maximum data rate, it may be two years or even longer before a final version is approved by the working group.

The 802.11ac standard is expected to breathe fresh air into wireless. It will take a number of features supported by previous WIFi standards just that bit further. It will play at 80 MHz and 160 MHz rather than the 40 MHz maximum that was supported by 802.11n, and support up to eight MIMO spatial streams, compared to N's four.

It has been designated ‘ac' because it uses the 5GHz frequency, used by the old 802.11a standard, rather than the 2.4GHz of G and N. Products that are compatible with draft versions of the 802.11ac standard may appear quite soon. Resellers may be tempted to try and steal the march on their rivals and go to market with these as soon as possible.

But that might not be the smartest move. Compatibility issues can plague products based on standard drafts - as happened with N a few years ago. A draft is likely to closely resemble the final standard that will eventually be adopted, but there may also be differences that cause problems.

When manufacturers started releasing draft N products, many did so in a bit of a hurry. It's a competitive market after all. But a lot of customers had only recently installed A or G wireless networks, which they did not want to rip out. The final standard should be backwards-compatible, but in its draft form, N was not quite as stable as it needed to be.

This caused a lot of pain and difficulty for end users and for resellers. In the end, upgrading to the N standard was a waste of time for many, with users gleaning no additional benefit.

And in the end, we needed a second draft of N to bridge the gap until the final N standard was delivered.

Added complexity
The problems were not really that much of a surprise, as N was more complicated than previous standards. It needed refinement before it would work without any issues. With the added complexity that 802.11ac brings, I would expect even more issues at the draft stage.

My advice to resellers is that you should instead be looking to persuade customers to switch to 802.11n right now. If they wait for the fully working version of 802.11ac, they could be waiting 18 months or more for offerings that are totally reliable and trustworthy.

This is why we think that, right now, it makes more sense to market 802.11n products right across the WLAN. The older standard really does still deliver a significant improvement in terms of range and performance over A and G technologies and with WiFi access becoming so ubiquitous now.

We have been encouraging our partners to take the 802.11n upgrade message to market and seen considerable successes, particularly in vertical markets such as hospitality, healthcare and education. It is quite easy to illustrate the benefits and cost-effectiveness of stepping up to N right now. Customers that want to delay upgrading until the AC standard is ready could be waiting for some time.

I would certainly not want to give you the impression that I think 802.11ac is an unwelcome development - far from it. We will be supporting it and making the technology available to customers - when it is fully ratified, tested, and products supporting the ratified standard can be made available. Releasing products that only comply with a draft of the coming AC standard, and by default encouraging our partners and their customers to make use of it, would in my view be taking something of a risk.

When exactly that is going to be, we don't know yet. Current predictions suggest that it won't be possible to offer products supporting a fully ratified and working 802.11ac standard until late in 2013. But we expect drafts of the standard to be released well before that time.

Products that support a draft 802.11ac standard may work perfectly well - but if they don't, suppliers will need to take responsibility.

James Harris is marketing development manager at ZyXel