As regular readers of this column know, I love to write. I grind out thousands of words every week, and, absent the occasional case of writer's block, I love to do it. I've been approached by a number of publishers about doing a book, and, while I'm indeed flattered to receive such offers, I can't commit to an effort of that scale. I read a lot of books, mostly on wireless technology, and most of them suffer from Too Many Words syndrome. A really good book, in my humble opinion, exhibits an economy of words, while still using a lot of them to convey the good stuff. Too many books are redundant both internally and externally; I don't have time for that.

But I couldn't do a book, not because I'd commit this sin, but rather because I just can't carve out the time to do it. I am always incredibly busy, and I really like it that way, despite the fact that it imposes certain limitations on other longer-term activities. But one book I wish I'd written would be called The History of IEEE the 802.11n Standard. This tale has it all - technology, intrigue, politics, business, and strategy. If you read Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machine, then you know what I'm getting at. If you didn't, this was the story of all that went into building a new computer, from scratch, back when such things could not be done by mere mortals. The twists and turns in the story are remarkable, even for non-techies.

Such it is with 802.11n. .11n is a task group (TG) charged with producing a standard for the next-generation physical layer (PHY). The key goals are performance above 100 Mbps, and backwards compatibility with the current PHYs. While developing such technology, especially in the form of a standard, is never easy, the path to .11n has been borderline tortuous. And the reason for this has little to do with the admittedly-difficult technology, and things may in fact get worse. Let me explain.

The most important radio technology today is MIMO. MIMO, which stands for multiple-input, multiple-output, adds improved range, reliability, and throughput to wireless through the use of spatial techniques. This is like adding a third dimension to the frequency (bandwidth or spectrum) and time already used, and more dimensions mean more room. That's it in a nutshell.

As you might guess, though, MIMO is a very, very difficult technology to implement. It has been used over the years in a variety of systems, but usually government and military projects where cost is of lesser importance. While I started looking at MIMO in 1995, even I was stunned when the first MIMO-based WLAN products came along in 2003. This was Belkin's "Pre-n" product line. Tests quickly showed that it was at least twice as fast as ordinary .11g products, and, while expensive, it clearly pointed the way. MIMO was then and remains today the clear and obvious future of WLANs.

The .11n standards

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