June 02, 2009, 9:42 AM — What's beamforming? Airtime fairness? When a vendor claims to support "wireless security," what kind of security are we talking about?
Like every industry, the Wi-Fi environment has its own vernacular. What can make conquering it particularly challenging is the long list of feature names and proprietary acronyms created by vendor marketing departments. All this verbiage is intended to help the vendors differentiate themselves. Often, though, the sheer volume of it simply confuses people.
To try to help ease this situation -- admittedly, as much for myself as for you, valued reader -- I've created a lexicon of about three dozen everyday Wi-Fi terms that are frequently used but aren't necessarily defined by formal 802.11 standards or in wireless textbooks. Different vendors might refer to them by different brand names, so this is intended to serve as your (and my) generic "cheat sheet" when your eyes start glazing over during a vendor presentation or when reading their collateral materials. You can access it for free here.
Case in point: Some vendors combine a number of radio frequency management and performance optimization tools under an umbrella name: Radio Resource Management, Adaptive Radio Management, M-Drive Technology, SmartRF, Air Traffic Control -- to name just a few. Some don't create separate names for each individual feature. Others give separate names to every feature under the umbrella, making their features list appear much longer. Still other vendors claim you don't certain features are not needed because their Wi-Fi architectures inherently solve the problem at hand.
You get the picture.
Joining me in this endeavor and keeping me honest are Devin Akin, CTO at Certified Wireless Network Professional (CWNP), a wireless training and certification company, and Paul DeBeasi, senior analyst at Burton Group. Hopefully, our lexicon -- written in as simple English as possible -- will ease the task of accurately comparing capabilities across the disparate vendors and systems in the Wi-Fi market.
Feel free to use this lexicon in any way you choose. It's a living document that will be edited from time to time as terminology changes. As such, all contributions and suggestions are welcome. Please submit suggestions to joanie@jwexler.com.
