Centrino branding to include draft 802.11n

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The IEEE 802.11n standard, which is not expected to be ratified before the first half of 2008, will give users far greater performance and range than current Wi-Fi technology. The technology will someday scale to 600Mbps, according to Bill McFarland, a member of the IEEE committee, with a range 50 percent greater than available with Wi-Fi now.

Although the news caused barely a ripple of reaction in the audience of software and hardware engineers, there are industry analysts who have already warned large buyers of wireless technology to resist the temptation to deploy high speed IEEE 802.11n devices until the standard is ratified.

This is the advice of Gartner's Ken Dulaney, among others, who said that a pre-standard version might be fine for the home where the technology exists as a closed loop, but in an enterprise with a heterogeneous wireless environment it could lead to interoperability problems down the road.

Continuing on a theme of emerging technologies, Crouch also touted the benefits of UWB (Ultra Wideband), a short range, three meters, wireless technology, which he said will start to gain recognition in ‘07.

UWB is sometimes called Wireless USB but with better performance. In addition, Crouch said the Bluetooth standards body will adopt UWB technology as a future version of Bluetooth.