More on the 802.11s mesh standard as word of a January compromise hits trade publications: Apparently, we all missed the news in January and March that progress was made on 802.11s, a mesh standard coming through the IEEE process, because Motorola's announcement a few days ago that they would support the draft and final version of the standard has sparked several articles. At Wi-Fi Planet, Eric Griffith tries to figure out the scope of what the spec encompasses. This can be tricky, because if you're outside the IEEE (or inside and not yet a voting member), you don't have access to the draft itself.
There seems to be a bit of back-and-forth over whether multi-radio outdoor nodes will be accommodated by the final 802.11s. Phil Belanger, who wrote about the indoor, peer-to-peer implications of 802.11s in a white paper published at Wi-Fi Networking News last month, thinks that the impact will be limited to end nodes that can act as mesh devices among each other.
Representatives of Motorola, Strix, and Belanger's former employer BelAir stated in Griffith's article that the implications are broader and that the standard now encompasses outdoor, multi-radio units. But none of the firms would suggest that the standard would, in fact, allow fully interoperable outdoor multi-radio nodes! In the best case, they'd have some minimal level of interoperability that would probably not be terribly useful.
Thus Belanger's original contention seems to be the accurate one, then: in practical terms, it's niche and end-user nodes that will benefit from 802.11s.