Sometime tonight, voting among the engineers charged with developing the IEEE"s 802.11n Wi-Fi standard will end, and smart money says the results--to be announced within days--will be a second draft of the superfast standard. For those who don"t follow the ins and outs of wireless networking, the 802.11n standard promises theoretical maximum speeds of up to 300 megabits per second, compared to 54 mbps for its predecessor, 802.11g, and 11 mbps for the original 802.11b standard.
Of course, real-world throughput is invariably a lot slower, especially if great distances and data encryption are involved. In our tests last fall of the first Wi-Fi gear based on the initial draft of the 802.11n standard, though, we saw speeds approaching those of ethernet connections at close rang