WiFi Fooey!

That’s what I say to this whole mess surrounding the next generation 802.11n WiFi specs. Industry representatives have not yet settled on a standard for the “N” spec, which should increase wireless bandwidth to two or three times the current “G” spec and extend range in many situations as well. The haggling over “N” specs has gone on for years now, and the major manufacturers of wireless routers finally lost patience this year by releasing lines of “Draft-N” routers and cards based on an early draft of the proposed 802.11n specs. The Pre-N products like Linksys WRT300N and NetGear RangeMAX Next lines may or may not be upgradeable to the official N standard when it arrives, and there is no guarantee of cross-vendor compatibility of the sort we are used to in the “B” and “G” standards. Perhaps frustrated with this ridiculous delay, the WiFi Alliance, which did a great job proselytizing and proliferating the 802.11b/g standards, announced last week that it would begin certifying “Pre-N” hardware to ensure consumers that various brands can work with one another.

A pox on everyone’s house in this wireless debacle and WiFi fooey to them all. I am a longtime WiFi home user with laptops, streaming media servers, and game consoles all hooked up to my “G” cloud. We desperately need a faster standard that reaches farther and deeper into typical homes. I have a “G” router set up in my basement and reception throughout my small townhouse is terrible. Even with an extra antenna set up to increase strength, I get dead zones everywhere. My laptop signal is good when it sits on the laptop desk next to my living room comfy chair, and gets serious impeded when I bring it onto my lap. Even worse for home theater nuts, the streaming media and Xbox Live downloads to my 360 are tortuous. Being able to stream Franz Ferdinand straight from my downstairs PC through the 360 and into my 5.1 home theater audio (with visualizations running on the 60-inch HDTV in 1080i) is a glimpse into the future of seamlessly connected home entertainment. Having it burp, gurgle and drop connections to a system that is less than 30 feet away is the kind of thing that makes you throw routers out windows. Even when “G” does work well, the shared bandwidth simply is not reliable and fast enough to accommodate the kinds of multimedia we want to pull into our home theaters.

I don’t know if I am suffering from interference, blockage due to my home’s architecture, or what. But I do know that moving to a “pre-N” router only added to my woes. I won’t name names, but the “Pre-N” router I tried was actually worse, and it was incompatible with my Xbox adapter. It actually failed to share my Internet connection, and tech support confirmed that the product had been released with this known issue involving Comcast connections.

I even gave up on wireless altogether at one point, and tested the latest iterations of the power line networking adapters. These units attach to your router via Ethernet and literally send the network signal across your power outlets at very high speeds. Another adapter in any other outlet sends the signal through an Ethernet cable to your PC or device. In practice, this actually worked fine…until it stopped working. I am still trying to figure out why my power line setup went south on me for no good reason, but for a while it looked like a great alternative to this WiFi mess, except that it, too, has issues with the Xbox and any of Microsoft’s Play4Sure media devices.

The moral of this story is that consumers may actually be getting ahead of the technology curve for once, and the geeks on the computing side of things are not ready to serve us geeks on the home entertainment side very well. I have a nice collection of remote PC, wireless device, and streaming media products all ready to get knit together in a user-friendly way. The standards aren’t there yet. The interfaces aren’t there yet. But I as a consumer am now ready for it.

And Franz Ferdinand just burped and gurgled again. Fooey!