what is Pre-N?

"Their vision was IEEE 802.11n, which would provide speeds equal to or greater than 100 Mbit/s LANs. Their work has yet to be completed. The lack of approval has led some to release so-called Pre-N equipment, which seeks to give the benefits of the 802.11n standard without an official standard."

"In January 2004 IEEE announced that it had formed a new 802.11 Task Group (TGn) to develop a new amendment to the 802.11 standard for local-area wireless networks. The real data throughput is estimated to reach a theoretical 540 Mbit/s (which may require an even higher raw data rate at the physical layer), and should be up to 40 times faster than 802.11b, and near 10 times faster than 802.11a or 802.11g. It is projected that 802.11n will also offer a better operating distance than current networks."

Helpful geek replaced (at goodly additional cost) our unreliable WRT54G v.2 with a Belkin Pre-N router. Works well, but what's Pre-N? How's it relate to 8011b/g?

Brad

William P.N. Smith hath wroth:

You must be an optimist. I predict that the 802.11n draft proposal will be exactly like the 802.11g compromise that conglomerated both the TI and Proxim proposals into one bloated spec. The two remaining

802.11n proposed standards each have their advantages and really need to be two seperate (and incompatible) standards. At this time, it's TGNSync and WWiSE. TGNSync and WWiSE were to have merged their proposals, but that fell apart.

I expect both sides to fight to the bitter end and refuse to compromise. There will probably be a deadlock vote (again) which will precipitate a compromise conglomeration of standards. It's the kind of thing the EWC (Enhance Wireless Consortium) would do:

So, in addition to Pre-N, we may two radically different Draft-N products to confuse from.

Oh, it's better than that! Now we get a whole new set of products labelled "Draft-N", so we can all throw away our Pre-N products and buy Draft-N, then in 2007 we can throw that all out and buy real official 802.11n stuff. 8*}

When is the anticipated fiNale date of MiMo.

I think you mean when will 802.11n be ratified by the IEEE.

like final approval in Mar 2007. Yawn....