Wi-Fi Alliance announces 802.11ac certification program

The Wi-Fi Alliance officially launched today a certification program for routers, adapters, and other wireless networking gear based on the IEEE 802.11ac draft standard.

"We want to ensure that the standard is substantially mature," said Wi-Fi Alliance senior marketing manager Kevin Robinson in an embargoed interview last week. "There is work that we have to go through to ensure interoperability, and [we're] fielding a test bed to certify that."

Testing is carried out at approved centres and involves interacting with eight reference designs, to ensure implementations play nicely together and don't upset previous versions. The 802.11ac specification mandates the broader 5GHz band, as opposed to the increasingly crowded 2.4GHz band, and all compatible devices must have the ability to use 80MHz channels to achieve the 1Gb/sec headline speed.

Routers conforming to 802.11ac will be country specific, with the knowledge of which bands are available in that territory. When a device connects, a spectral map will be forwarded using the 802.11d process, so client and server both know where they are and how loud they can shout.

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