A schismatic group of companies secretly working outside the IEEE 802.11n group's process may submit a new proposal Monday: News.com reports that Intel, Broadcom, Marvell, and Atheros have a new plan. All but Broadcom are also part of TGn Sync; Broadcom was part of the WWiSE proposal. The future of 802.11n has huge market consequences, and there's more than a whiff of collusion when four giant semiconductor makers engage outside a standards process.
Still, by presenting their proposal, they may take potential prosecution off the table. But it's unclear whether if their proposal isn't accepted that they go back to the table or walk off and start a trade group as happened with 802.15.3a and UWB (ultrawideband). Intel leads the WiMedia Alliance (formerly the WiMedia Alliance and the Multi-Band OFDM Alliance).
It is very interesting to me to see these big Chip players, many of which are active participants in the emerging 802.16e WIMAX products, scrambling to deflect, defeat or delay any effort by the 802.11n standards group to select a superior MIMO based chip from Airgo for the new standard.
Intel is especially concerned in that the 802.11n standard with a Airgo chip set, when combined with recent 802.11e and i standards just released, would marginalize much of what is being planned for the 802.16e portable mobile WiMAX standard. In effect the target users would be allowed to use their existing 802.11a/b/g based customer access devices with this Airgo based 802.11n device, or upgarde to a low cost n based device.
In short it is WiMAX that is the issue.
Jacomo