Following hot on the heels of WLANA, the Wireless LAN Alliance, comes the Wireless LAN Interoperability Forum, WLIF. However, the group seems to be little more than an umbrella for those companies that have licensed Proxim Inc’s RangeLAN2 technology – and one source at a rival manufacturer has suggested that the Forum was launched because Proxim has discovered problems in making RangeLAN2 compliant with the IEEE’s forthcoming 802.11 wireless local network standard. Ostensibly at least, the 15 founder members of the WLIF say they are concentrating on providing fast-to-market, interoperable, real-world wireless local network systems. The group is aiming to publish a complete, and open, interface specification this summer. It also plans to establish a certification program, to ensure interoperability between different vendors’ products. The Wireless Interoperability gang is at pains to say that it is not setting itself up against the IEEE, although it does admit that it is hard to av oid the perception that the WLI Forum interface offers a competitive alternative to… 802.11. Chris Gladwin, Zenith Electronics Corp’s representative and chairman of the Forum, would not directly comment on whether the Interoperability Forum’s work will diverge from 802.11, but said that If 802.11 is the path to [a viable commercial system], that’s fantastic – implying that it may not be. Similarly, he stopped short of saying that the standard will be fully 802.11-compliant, commenting th at I expect [the 802.11 standard] to become an important part of the Forum’s program. While some of the membership of the Wireless LAN Alliance and the Wireless LAN Interoperability Forum overlaps – notably AMP Inc, Norand Corp, Raytheon Co, and P roxim – the other members of the latter have steered clear of the former – and conversely, the Alliance includes some heavyweights, such as 3Com Corp IBM Corp, Digital Equipment Corp and Lucent Technologies Inc, that have avoided the Forum. The reas on for this, according to Gladwin, is that the Forum was formed to get inter-operable products on the market as soon as possible, and companies such as IBM and 3Com wanted a fundamentally different approach to that proposed by the Forum members. In terms of speed, for example, IBM has pushed for 1Mbps and 5Mbps transmission rates, while 3Com’s favored speed is 10Mbps, says Gladwin.
