To "g" or not to "g"? That is the question. At least, that is the question in wireless-LAN circles these days. Specifically, whether it is nobler in the mind to hold off selling silicon for 802.11g adapters and access points until the .11g standard is finalized, or to jump in early with chip sets and promises of make-good drivers and firmware.
Talk to the silicon vendors, and you'll hear many answers to that question. Funny thing, the answers eerily correlate with the timing of product availability: The later the shipments, the more ardent the support of pre-ratification abstinence.
If abstinence is a virtue, then Broadcom Corp. is surely the least virtuous of the bunch. It was first to market with pre-g hardware, offering up its so-called 54g silicon last November. Several home-networking suppliers, including the LinkSys Group Inc. and Belkin Corp. in North America, quickly signed on.
Others have since pulled in their schedules for 802.11g chip sets, in part because of recent progress on the standard within IEEE's WLAN working group, and in part because of the overwhelming success of the hardware built around Broadcom's chip set.
In hindsight, it's not hard to see why 54g has been so successful. It filled a void for home-networking suppliers, which desperately needed an up-sell over 802.11b.
Increasingly, .11g looked like it would fit the bill. Like .11a, it would offer higher, 54-Mbit/second bandwidth-but with the same 2.4-GHz radio as .11.b. Problem was, the standard wasn't set. The pressure on the working group to hurry it up, already, grew intense.
And then came Broadcom.
Competitors were furious. What if the standard changed, and Broadcom's pre-g silicon didn't interoperate with the final-g product? Mostly, though, I think they were angry they didn't think of it. Profits 101 tells us that the earlier to market, the fatter the margins.
So, was Broadcom a good WLAN community member? Hell, no. By jumping in early, it risked spoiling a badly needed up-sell before it could cure. Now, the onus is on the WLAN working group to not sour the market by rendering incompatible the pre-g hardware already in circulation.
Meanwhile, though, Broadcom is collecting time-to-market spoils that others are now scrambling to share.
And that, my friends, is the answer.
Mike Feibus is Principal Analyst at Techknowledge Strategies Inc. (Scottsdale, Ariz.), a market research firm. Reach him at mike@techknowledge-group.com.
RSS
RSS| 
Digital| 
Mobile
