Notebook users have not being showing much interest in the latest iteration of Wi-Fi, according to the remote connectivity firm iPass.
Speaking to ZDNet.co.uk on Thursday, the company's director of global product marketing, Piero De Paoli, 802.11n has made no impact yet on the hotspot market.
"We are not getting companies asking when we will support it," De Paoli told ZDNet.co.uk on Thursday. "Hotspot providers are all using [the currently ubiquitous Wi-Fi standard] 802.11g. We haven't really seen 802.11n. We think it's a lot of hype."
iPass is a company that offers connectivity to business travellers through a variety of options ranging from dial-up to Ethernet, but mainly through its deals with Wi-Fi hotspot aggregators around the world.
802.11n is yet to be ratified as an official standard by the IEEE, and 802.11n equipment is currently only available under a "Draft 2.0" label. 802.11n accomplishes higher throughput because it uses three antennae and has increased bandwidth and more advanced modulation techniques. It can also use the less crowded 5GHz band, while 802.11b/g can only use 2.4GHz.
However, Intel in particular has made the high-speed, high-bandwidth version of Wi-Fi available as an option in many new notebook computers for the last year.
De Paoli was keen to add that 802.11n may become popular in the future, if and when users start to use high-definition videoconferencing applications while on the move, but claimed that hotspot operators would avoid the new standard until such usage becomes commonplace.
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"We're not hearing that 802.11g is slow," said De Paoli. Similar thoughts have been expressed even by some within the Wi-Fi manufacturing industry, such as Aruba's Roger Hockaday, who recently suggested that the modest demands of today's applications — along with certain interoperability issues — would make current generations of 802.11n an unnecessary "headache" for IT departments.
De Paoli also claimed that the pace of innovation in the wireless networking market had created problems with the model of embedding new connectivity options within laptops. "Most companies keep their laptops for three years, but the technology seems to change every six months," he said. Referring to the explosion of new connectivity technologies such as HSDPA, HSUPA, WiMax and others, he suggested that it was more sensible to use external cards or modems in the current climate.
