The discussions over 802.11n specifications resemble the fourth movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony: The end of the final movement has so many bursts of music punctuated by silent pauses that it's hard to know whether to begin applauding or wait for the orchestra to issue one more musical flourish.

Michael Hurlston, vice president of Broadcom, told the World Broadband Forum that the impasse, which has caused delays in finalizing the standard, is about to be broken. He also said that interoperable products would reach the market soon after ratification. Hurlston told EETimes that the standardization effort was "plagued by difficult issues and far too much politics," but that discussions between the competing coalitions, WWiSE and TGn Sync, would end with a solution.

Hurlston also referred to a recent move by Intel, Atheros, Marvell, and Broadcom--but excluding Airgo--to link on interoperable PHY and MAC layers and submit the plan to the IEEE by November, a move which made some furious and many uneasy. "If people go off and develop a subset of the standard outside of the IEEE 802.11 working groups, the end game would be to bring back such as splinter group into the fold," he said.

For more on the state of 802.11n discussion:
- see John Walko's InformationWeek report