SAN JOSE, Calif. — Atheros Communications Inc. will try to drive 802.11n into mainstream Wi-Fi markets with a new line of chips using a streamlined version of the specification. The Atheros Align family uses only a single antenna to target 11g price points.
Analysts said they expect other Wi-Fi chip makers to follow suit with their own single-stream 11n products. However, they also cautioned that the 11n market may face confusion from the emerging diversity of configurations.
Today most 802.11n products use 2x2 MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) antennas to deliver as much as ten times the throughput of older 11g devices. However at nearly twice the cost, the 11n devices command only about a third the market share of 11g, despite the fact the Wi-Fi Alliance began certifying draft 11n products in June 2007.
In the second quarter of 2008, revenue for draft 11n products accounted for 21 percent of the market compared to 64 percent for 802.11g and 15 percent for multimode b/g/a, according to Victoria Fodale, a senior analyst with market watcher In-Stat.
"We had OEMs coming to us with plans to build 2009-10 devices with Wi-Fi, but they wanted to use .11g," said Todd Antes, vice president of marketing at Atheros. "It was clear to us the next large opportunity for .11n was to move legacy .11g designs up to a more efficient standard," he added.
By stripping out support for multiple radios, Atheros is betting it can create a new class of higher volume 11n devices that hit the estimated $3-5 pricing of 11g parts but deliver better performance.
"The price/value proposition is clear, but there is the potential for consumer confusion regarding product compatibility since the 11n specification allows for one, two, three, or even four spatial streams," said Fodale of In-Stat.
Indeed, Quantenna recently became the latest of several startups to debut 11n chips with aggressive MIMO configurations, aiming at support for whole home Wi-Fi and high definition video. Antes suggested the Wi-Fi Alliance is working on a solution to let users mix and match different variants of 11n.
"The 11n standard is much richer than anything we've had to work with before, covering from one- to four-stream products," Antes said. "We believe there is opportunity for future three- and four-stream products, but you need to have both the client and router products to deliver the performance and we think that ecosystem is probably a year or more away," he added
