Yo! G

T+D, Sept, 2003

Products equipped with 802.11g Wi-Fi capability have been on the market for some time now. But it wasn't until June that the new standard finally gained approval from the Standards Board Review Committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. A green light from the IEEE is huge step for 802.11g that could usher in a high-speed wireless networking standard.

Where the 11g standard differs from the more common 11b standard is speed. 802.11g is fast, offering connection speeds of up to 54Mbps. To put that into context, a typical home cable connection is 3-10Mbps, Another upshot to 802.11g is that it's backwards compatible with 802.11b.

With high-speed and backward compatibility, you'd think that 802.11g would be a slam dunk. Well, not quite. There's another high-speed standard in this alphabet soup of Wi-Fi connectivity.

The competing standard 802.11a, introduced in 1999, offers 802.11g-level performance with a couple of twists. The 11a standard operates at a much higher frequency, 5-6GHz, which avoids interference from popular short-range wireless devices, such as those equipped with Bluetooth and even your microwave. That's its most noticeable advantage. But for some analysts, 802.11a's stumbling block is its lack of compatibility with earlier standards. So, if you want the speed of 802.11a and you're already an 802.11b user, you're going to have to shell out the big bucks, Oh, and 11a hasn't received governmental approval in much of Europe.

Reports on the future of wireless standards from the Wi-Fi Alliance are rather utopian, where all formats coexist in multistandard devices, but whatever happened to the goal of one standard? For now, there are plenty of gadgets coming to market that work with both 802.11b and 11g.