In response to member concerns, the Wi-Fi Alliance says it is conducting its own tests of recent allegations from Broadcom about bad-neighbor gear: In November, Broadcom said that networks built using Atheros's Super-G chips caused significant degradation of other nearby networks. In addition to posting results of Broadcom's tests, Tim Higgins at SmallNetBuilder (now Tom’s Networking) conducted his own tests and curiously found that products with Atheros' Super-G chips degraded nearby Broadcom networks but not networks with other chips.
The Wi-Fi Alliance closely watched news reports of the allegations. "We've had some of our member companies ask us what are we doing on this and is this an issue," said Frank Hanzlik, managing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance. In response to members, the Alliance has begun its own set of tests. "We are undergoing some testing to try for our own benefit to validate the issues and to take some of the grayness out of this," he said. They'll test how nearby networks might affect a network in a house next door or as close as an apartment next door. "The results of that will determine what actions if any we need to take with our certification program or with any products that are associated with it," he said.
Interoperability is becoming an increasingly important issue as vendors add proprietary extensions that differentiate their products, sometimes based on in-progress drafts of standards from IEEE committees. The Wi-Fi Allliance will certify products that have such extensions as long as they ship in a configuration that's interoperable with certified products, Hanzlik said.
While the Alliance recently noted that as many as 25 percent of products fail to receive certification the first time they are submitted to the process, Hanzlik estimates that as many as 85 percent or 90 percent of 802.11 products on the market are certified.