Netgear has released a range of wireless LAN kit that meets 802.11 draft standards

Netgear has released a range of wireless LAN (WLAN) equipment that is compliant with the IEEE's draft 802.11n specification, but business buyers may prefer to wait for the standard to be ratified and for interoperability testing with other vendor solutions to be completed before investing.

The RangeMax Next product family, which includes routers, access points and PC Cards, will transmit data at speeds up to a theoretical maximum of 300Mbit/s, though 100Mbit/s is more likely. The kit is backwards compatible with existing 802.11b/g WLAN equipment, said Netgear.

Mark Main, senior analyst with research firm Ovum, pointed out that the draft 802.11n spec will remain incomplete until the standard's final ratification in 2007 and could alter in the mean time. He fears that pre-ratification 802.11n equipment will follow the same pattern as early 802.11g devices. These suffered from interoperability and backwards compatibility problems that left many users with essentially proprietary WLAN solutions unable to connect with other vendor's kit.

"If you really need the extra throughput and are happy to take the risk go ahead, but make sure that the products can be firmware upgraded to conform with the finalised spec," he said.

Netgear chief executive Patrick Lo argued that further changes to the draft specification are unlikely, however, given that 75 percent of the voting engineers sitting on the 802.11n committee would have to be in favour.

"We expect the draft will stay pretty much solid and any small alterations can be handled by a firmware upgrade," he said.

An IEEE task force is also working to improve WLAN security by defining the 802.11w specification. The new standard will encrypt management as well as data frames in order to secure authentication, stop information leakage, and prevent some denial-of-service attacks.