Advances in WiFi technology seems to have no let up as the demand and desire for higher speeds and longer effective ranges are driving the constant innovations. Now that vendors want to increase their shrinking margins on commodity 802.11a, b, and g equipment they are now pushing for higher speeds as well as the faster ratification of the 802.11n standard. Airgo Networks, wanting to jump the gun on other companies, already designed its own 802.11n-like chip that will be first used by Netgear for its RangeMax 240 router. This will have a maximum speed of 240 Mbps.

In fact, a battle is expected to happen over the next generation WLAN standard – IEEE 802.11n, that promises speeds of 100Mbps or higher and even increased range. Actually, Airgo’s announcement is likely to create rift between Cisco, Intel, and Sony one side and Nokia, Texas Instruments and Airgo on the other.

But the loser here could be the enterprise consumer buying nonstandard implementations of the 802.11n technology under the belief (albeit mistaken) that it is going to be interoperable with other products.

Airgo’s MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) Gen3 chip is expected to be backwards-compatible with the older 802.11a, b, and g standards but remains unclear if it is going to work with the actual 802.11n standard.

It looks like consumers will have to endure a protracted WiFi standards battle that we’ve seen so many times before. Consumers are always the losers in these battles so hopefully the companies involved will be able to resolve the matter quickly before consumers take a big hit.