14 DAY TRIAL // Exactly after the acquisition of Airgo, Qualcomm has sent out a press release that announced the coming of AGN400 WiFi Qualcomm chipset. Regarding the chipset, Qualcomm said:
"QUALCOMM Incorporated a leading developer and innovator of advanced wireless technologies and data solutions today announced the availability of the world's first chipset offering full support for Draft 2.0 of the IEEE 802.11n standard. Drawing on its full compatibility with Draft 2.0 of the IEEE 802.11n standard, and backward compatibility to 802.11 a/b/g and Draft 1.0 of 802.11n, the AGN400 enables development of PC OEM products that connect with all devices supporting any form of the 802.11 standards."
All things considered, the Qualcomm device might be a good idea. It's just that the 802.11n Draft 2.0 standard still holds some 370 issues to be resolved by the IEEE, and it's also a fact that there won't be any 2.0 standard specs at least until March 2007 when the next voting session will be held. As for the AGN400, Qualcomm says it can claim Draft 2.0 compliance because the chipset supports what the company thinks is everything proposed in the upcoming specification sheet.
When asked whether the final 2.0 specs could include something that wasn't introduced in the AGN400 Raleigh replied: "It's exceedingly unlikely that there will be new things we didn't anticipate. All the chip makers are there and trending toward what's in 2.0. If someone threw a curve now, it would attack the whole industry ? It would be out of bounds of the process to suggest a brand new idea."
That's some forward thinking coming from Qualcomm but it might not reflect the actual events, since Draft n 2.0 specs are more like guidelines that fixed technical references. I wonder what they're going to do if 2.0 final standards do contain something different.