WiFi Alliance Makes Noises About Problematic Proprietary Extensions
There’s a new battle brewing in the WiFi space. While companies have been pushing out proprietary extensions to WiFi equipment to make it run faster, the WiFi Alliance is now threatening to pull WiFi certification from products that interfere with other WiFi offerings. However, as Glenn Fleishman points out at WiFi Networking News, vendors might not care so much. Not having the WiFi brand name may not matter that much any more. In the minds of many users WiFi is a generic term, and they won’t notice whether or not a product has the WiFi label or not… and that could lead to, in Glenn’s words, a Balkanization of WiFi. Of course, part of the reason for this is the slow speed with which the WiFi Alliance responded to these problems, such that it’s much harder for them to do anything about it now.
