You all thought I was going to spell out “Android” didn’t you? Actually, I’m referring to 802.11n. All the smartphones and PMPs we are familiar with may be getting 802.11n next year. Finally, a couple chip makers are making your dreams come true. Broadcom and Atheros will both have a chip out. Broadcom has a 9 month lead time on Atheros, however, Atheros claims their offering will be much more power efficient and have great signal capabilities. They go on to state their “n” offering will be 20% more efficient than their “g” offering currently in use in the Zune HD. I’m still of the opinion that the real world performance different of “n” and “g” on a smartphone or similar device will be very little considering I think the bottleneck would be the processing power needed to chomp through the data increase. However, it’s very nice to see some progress and even if there is no real speed increase, a reduction of power by 20% is always a good thing as Wifi is a huge vampire of juice in portable devices now.
Atheros will offer it’s AR6003, a third generation chip, with built in bluetooth as well as 802.11n and offers up to 85Mbits/s in the “n” frequencies. Broadcom is offering it’s BCM4329, which should be shipping very soon. Broadcom is a big supplier to Apple in it’s iPhone and iPod touch models. Let’s hope of of these two solutions makes it into an Android phone soon.
