Chipmaker Broadcom has announced the development of a WiFi “N” chip designed to comply with the draft 802.11 N specification by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Dubbed the Intensi-fi line of wireless chipset for WiFi cards, routers, and other equipment, the “N” iteration of the WiFi standards is designed to reach speeds of up to 540 Mbps, or about ten times the data rate of today’s popular “G” standard, at ranges surpassing “G” ranges by up to three times.

The development of the “N” standard has initially been met with skepticism, given that chipset developers and equipment manufacturers had gone ahead and marketed devices marked as having pre-“N” specifications even without the IEEE’s having released a draft standard. Given the IEEE Standards Association maintains the standards for Local Area Networking (LAN) and Wireless LAN, users of such hardware faced the risk of their devices becoming obsolete once a standard has been published. Also, there was no assurance that pre-“N” devices from one manufacturer would be able to work seamlessly with a device from another brand,

Nonetheless, WiFi “N” gained the interest of computer and multimedia aficionados because of the high data rate and range it promised to offer. The combination of speed and range is ideal for transmitting large amounts of dats, such as high definition video and audio files.