Battles rage over future wireless router tech

WITH WIRELESS routers evolving faster than PCs these days, it's interesting to take a look at what should be available in the next 18 months. Currently, vanilla Wireless-G routers are available from $9.95 (Belkin) to $39.95 (Linksys) in the local Big Box while high-end MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) "pre 802.11n" devices run between $130 to $180, depending on the brand.

A lot of the "pre-n" stuff will likely get flushed out (i.e. rebated and dumped) once a single standard for 802.11n is approved, but it's not clear when this will happen. There was a vote Down Under in Australia last week to try to select between proposal blocks called TGn Sync and WWiSE. TGn Sync wants channel widths of 40 MHz with a minimum of two antennas and is supported by Atheros, Cisco, Intel, Qualcomm, and Philips. WWiSE wants 20 MHz channels with more antennas and is supported by Airgo, Broadcom, Motorola, and Texas Instruments. Another vote may come at the next 802.11n working group meeting in July in San Francisco if some sort of compromise can be hammered out before then by the dueling groups. If a vote comes in July to agree on one standard, true 802.11n hardware might appear in 2007, but it's not a good bet. Vendors have been squabbling over UWB standards for the last 18 months without resolution.

If you don't have standards, then what's left? Features, features, features. Maybe an extra chip or two, but still more features. John Scully, formerly of Apple and Pepsi, would like his OpenPeak (www.openpeak.com) investment to provide an extension to universal Plug and Play to recognize telephony devices. As a part of this effort, OpenPeak would likely roll out an OEM-able software package to drop into a wireless router to include phone controls and a mini-PBX for a more friendly consumer VoIP experience. It would be smart enough to automatically discover IP phones on the network and configure them, just the sort of thing you'd like to have if you have a larger household or small business with a handful of IP phones on the LAN. More ambitious people have fantasies of everyone being their own mini-phone company and connecting calls for roaming Wi-Fi VoIP phones, but it seems to be a little bit over-optimistic, especially with the sudden urgency for VoIP emergency 911 services in the States.

Speaking of E-911 services, another nice little feature that at least one manufacturer will try is to put a GPS chip into a router, along with various software hooks to provide location information to third-party applications. GPS, if available, provides an absolute method of positioning that public safety personnel have already clamored for in the cellular phone industry. GPS would also open up a "reference point" for location-based services, so you can always known where you are when you are lost, even if you have a Wi-Fi phone or laptop without GPS, or for system admins to track down where they misplaced a particular piece of gear.

Sceptics will argue that GPS signals are too weak to be effective indoors, but Phillips and others have developed various software enhancements and workarounds. Arguably, the high-end router of the future may also be pressed into service as an indoors GPS signal repeater, but this gets into certain types of RF and regulatory ugliness best to be left for another day.

Finally, it's not a great stretch of the imagination for a next-generation Wi-Fi router to incorporate either a healthy amount of flash and/or mini-hard drive for around 4 GB of non-volatile storage. Or just a CompactFlash and/or SD slot to add storage for configuration updates and for people to run their own smaller web servers on their routers. Storage is cheap enough and processors will likely be fast enough, not to mention the number of people that don't want to spend $9.95 a month for web page service. µ