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Vacation: Yeah, I know I'm on vacation, but two key reports came through worth sharing now. Watch for an explosion of backlog starting Tuesday.
Military and industry compromise on use of 5 GHz band: Non-technical news accounts indicate that in-use frequency avoidance seems to be a key part of the compromise: that is, the unlicensed equipment will have to skip frequencies that have radar patterns on them. The article cited here says that it opens 255 MHz more bandwidth, which would be in accord with a couple of Senate bills. The tense of the article is odd at times, as it seems to say that 802.11a isn't yet in use, although equipment has been shipping for over a year. I don't have the numbers handy, but the current U-NII band has about 300 MHz. This could be a boon for 802.11a and related manufacturers, as well as providing more fertile test ground for ultrawideband (UWB).
802.11g interoperability secret test: Not quite so secret, the Wi-Fi Alliance held a plugfest of sorts, checking how chipmakers' reference designs and shipping or to-ship 802.11g draft equipment all works together. Concerns have been raised (watch for summary next week) that the early gear basically forces networks with any 802.11b traffic down to 802.11b speeds, and that g equipment from the two shipping vendors (Intersil and Broadcom) doesn't interoperate as well as it should. We'll see if there's more confirmation after additional testing. (In related news, a reader of my co-written Apple wireless blog, discovered a simple way to get Linksys's WPC54G PC Card to work under OS X using the AirPort Extreme drivers.)