The IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee, the group drawing up standards for wired and wireless LANs, has become embroiled in cynical in-fighting. Can it survive and remain relevant?
"IEEE802 is already on the verge of collapsing," warned a professor at a Japanese university, and an engineer at a Japanese research institute added, "If this situation continues I'm afraid that IEEE802 will just become superfluous."
The IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee of the US, the group drawing up standards for wired and wireless local area networks (LAN), has problems. The group has achieved major progress in the past, standardizing transfer protocols as a key infrastructural technology in networks like Ethernet and WiFi. 1,500 or more engineers, researchers and others from around the world gather at the general meetings held three times a year, making it one of the leading international standardization organizations.
Over the last year, however, the various working groups (WG) positioned under the 802 Committee, which handle the actual standardization work, are dissolving without developing a draft proposal, or being put on hold (Fig 1). In many cases the cause is an intense difference of opinion inside the WGs, and inability to find a compromise solution. Participants are beginning to question the significance of the 802 Committee itself.
The confrontations emerging in the 802 Committee WGs are due to intense battles to gain control of the standard between participating manufacturers. The unique method of operation of the 802 Committee itself has invited this result.
Power Struggles
In principle, each participant in the meeting has one vote when it comes to running the 802 Committee, so that all committee decisions are made with the consent of the majority. This approach is based on the "individual model", where engineers participate as individuals in developing and evaluating the international standard. The approach was born as a way to escape the problem posed by the previous method, where a few big corporations might talk only to each other and draw up standards to suit themselves. By allowing engineers to be directly involved in the standardization process as neutral parties, the goal was to avoid the clash of egos that big corporate members would bring.
As it turns out, though, the individual model is exactly what is causing all the trouble for the 802 Committee. Individual members supported by specific corporations, organizations, etc, now exercise their voting rights for their sponsors, and on a scale that is now impossible to ignore. As a result, the very power games that the new approach was designed to avoid are back again.
802.20: Crash and Burn
The IEEE802.20 working group was the site of furious power gaming, and ended up with the parent organization, the IEEE Standards Association (SA), issuing an order stopping all group activity - something that had never happened before. An engineer at a Japanese telecommunications carrier said, "I've been on the 802 Committee for a long time, but I've never seen such anger and name-calling at any meeting before."
The 802.20 WG was established in December 2002 to develop radio communication technology achieving a throughput of over 1Mbps from high-speed platforms, moving at 250kph. It was split off from the IEEE802.16 WG standardizing fixed wireless access (FWA), specifically to develop a standard for mobile communication. Leading corporations in the field included Flarion Technologies Inc of the US, which developed the Flash-OFDM transmission technology for mobile platforms.
Debate proceeded relatively slowly in the new WG until about August 2005, when Flarion Technologies was acquired by Qualcomm Inc of the US, then accelerated rapidly (Fig 2). At the meeting in September 2005 a surprise announcement was made: technical proposals for the new standard would be due by the following meeting. It was unheard of to solidify a draft proposal in only three months.
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