

Why 802.11n took so long to become a standard. - AndrewDucker
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141692/802.11n_Fast_Wi_Fi_s_long_tortuous_road_to_standardization_

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jrockway
Nice to see that everyone cooperated and ended up reaching an agreement, even
when the big players could have easily done without the smaller players. If
Intel, for example, said "fuck the standards" and only built wireless cards to
their spec, they would do fine. Anyone buying a modern laptop would pretty
much be stuck with that, which means any routers using the alternate standard
would be useless. But they stuck around anyway, and in the future, we can be
sure that 802.11n devices will work together. Nice!

(The only problem is that the draft version was called "Wireless N" popularly.
They should have called it M or something, then when the real thing came out,
people would not wonder "why doesn't my wireless M device work 100% with my
wireless N router". Since both variants are now called N, there is bound to be
confusion.)

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InclinedPlane
So far as I know, all of the draft devices were labelled as "Wireless N draft"
or somesuch, I doubt all that many people were confused. Flash your devices
with updated firmware and all should be good.

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jrockway
Many computer geeks may not be confused by this, but many normal people will
probably wonder why their "802.11 a/b/g/n" wifi card doesn't work with their
"802.11 a/b/g/n" router.

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yardie
I remember the 56K (56Flex, and the other one by 3Com) modem standard wasn't
set yet. My ISP had 3Com gear and I was using a different chip so the fastest
speed possible 33.6k. Some ISPs had 2 numbers so you could get in the right
pool for your chipset.

Back in 2004 I saw some of the first draft-n routers and decided to hold off
buying until a standard arriver. I didn't think it would take 5 years. I'm
sort of glad I didn't buy at the time because I doubt those early models,
despite saying they were upgradeable, would have the hardware to meet the
spec. I doubt the manufacturer even cares anymore and EOLed a lot of them.

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elblanco
Is there no better way? Standards are great, but we're also seeing the slow
release of standards (and the slow adoption of standards) having real,
negative repercussions -- see HTML5 and the various flavors of CSS as
examples.

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smanek
What's the problem with HTML5 and CSS (assuming you're referring to CSS3 ...)?

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elblanco
If I'm not mistaken the HTML standard improves and updates at a pace that
could charitably be called "glacial". And when it does, it rarely seems to be
in the direction anybody wants -- for example, web designers have been crying
for something near a decade would that force adopters of the standard to
follow common sense layout guidelines, that way their work doesn't break in
different browsers for different incompatible reasons. Everybody thought CSS
would be it, but I've rarely seen a CSS heavy design that didn't rely on a
bunch of hacks to deliver the desired layout or formatting. But it was
critically important that a "footer" tag was recently included in the spec.

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scorxn
Non-paginated version:
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9141692/802.11n...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9141692/802.11n_Fast_Wi_Fi_s_long_tortuous_road_to_standardization_)

