Wi-Fi akes new turn with "wireless-G"

B IL L C A R D O N I effort into figuring out how its rival does it. But O‘Brien, Pyramid’s market researcher, noting that Huawei has intellectual property of its own that it will have to defend some day, warns that if Chinese companies “want to be serious international players, they need to generate an appreciation for the rules of the game. ” Firms as diverse as Sony, Adobe Systems, and Unilever have brought suits involving intellectual property against Chinese rivals. What goes for Huawei and similarly situated Chinese companies really goes for the country as a whole. The Chinese government may not enforce intellectual property rules “to the extent that American companies want them to, but it is in their best [long-term] interest [to do so],” says Grace Chen, an attorney at the Beijing office of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP (New York City). The government-controlled China Daily (Beijing) reported on 12 May that the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology had issued new regulations to Chinese research institutes and technology firms to prevent them from copying products made by other domestic or overseas firms—a common practice in the past. The Business Software Alliance’s Asia branch (Singapore) would like China to go further still, says its vice president, Jeffrey Hardee. Though the situation in China is improving as more companies are taking civil action, Hardee says, his organization is pressing for cases of piracy in China to be prosecuted criminally. But foreign companies that go to court against Chinese companies must also be prepared to face a backlash. Many of the Chinese media outlets—which increasingly reflect public opinion, rather than just serving as a mouthpiece for the government— leapt to Huawei’s side, declaring that Cisco was trying to block competition. The government’s favored point of view was well expressed by Zhang Qi, an official at the Ministry of Information Industry, who was quoted in the Guangming Daily News as saying: “It is not the best solution to go to court. It is best to talk out of court. ” —Jen Lin-Liu COMMUNICATIONS•On 12 June, the IEEE Standards Association’s Standards Board formally ratified IEEE 802.11g, an amendment to the wildly popular local-area networking standard known as Wi-Fi. But details of the standard were largely settled last year, enough so that by last January, manufacturers like Linksys Group Inc. and D-Link Systems Inc., both in Irvine, Calif. , jumped the gun and shipped to retail stores their home and small-office routers incorporating the standard [see photo, above]. Consumers, in turn, have for some months faced the choice of which 802.11 flavor is best. Anyone walking the aisles of a computer store finds shelves stocked with a bewildering assortment of local networking products, labeled with an alphanumeric soup worthy of a government bureaucracy. IEEE 802.11g is an extension of 802.11b and competes with 802.11a, with which it shares many features. So one obvious question some consumers are asking themselves is whether, given that a has yet to take off in a big way, it will now be superseded by g. Does a still have a real mission? In fact, at an 802.11 conference held in Boston in June, industry analysts and executives were unanimous that within a year or so, virtually all access points will be dualmode, accommodating both 802.11a and 802.11g. And since the 802.11g standard is backward compatible with b, the so-called A shopper at a Best Buy store in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. , looks over a Linksys office router with built-in IEEE 802.11g capabilities. The product, dubbed “Wireless G,” was released in anticipation of the standard’s finalization.