Wi-Fi Alliance begins certifying new standard-compliant 802.11n gear

The Wi-Fi Alliance announced it has begun certifying fully standard-compliant 802.11n products and added new testing for some popular optional features now more widely available in WiFi equipment.

To reflect the new standard that was finally ratified earlier this month, the alliance introduced an updated logo, family of tag lines and a product labeling matrix.

Testing for new optional features include:

• Test support for simultaneous transmission of up to three spatial streams 
• Packet aggregation (A-MPDU), to make data transfers more efficient
• Space-time Block Coding (STBC), a multiple-antenna encoding technique to improve reliability in some environments
• Channel coexistence measures for "good neighbor" behavior when using 40 MHz operation in the 2.4 GHz band

Glenn Fleishman at Wi-Fi Net News said the most significant change in the Wi-Fi Alliance's certification of 802.11n product will be around three-stream N, which will enable raw data rates of 450 Mbps and potentially address three mobile devices at one time that are using single-stream 802.11n. Four-stream 600 Mbps devices are still on the horizon.

Older devices are likely to to see some minor firmware updates.

For more:
- see this Wi-Fi Alliance release [1]
- check out Wi-Fi Net News [2]

Related articles:
Six years after first draft version, 802.11n finally official standard
[3]New iPod touch sports 802.11n chip [4]
802.11n [5] to become standard in 2010
Wi-Fi Alliance to pre-certify [6] pre-n products
Qualcomm unveils high performance 802.11n chips [7]