But who cares about upgradeability? I doubt if any residential users will care about this -- once they get the router and client working in their homes, they'll never touch the settings on these products again. So, given that MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output), on which .11n and the draft products are based, really is a great leap forward, perhaps the "draft compliant" products are sufficiently impressive in performance so as to ignore issues related to the standard (or lack thereof) altogether.

Alas, this is not the case, at least as of a week ago, when I ran extensive benchmark tests on the "draft" products. The results, as detailed in our latest Farpoint Group Technical Note, showed that none of the "draft n" products offered performance as good as at least one non-draft-compliant, MIMO-based router that has been on the market for some time. Both throughput and range were much less than I've come to expect. And the "draft" products also failed to interoperate with each other at greater than .11g speeds, which one wouldn't expect given the claims of draft compliance. But the IEEE doesn't specify compliance, compatibility or interoperability criteria, especially in drafts, so I'm not sure exactly what we're getting from the draft.

My advice is to wait for products compliant with whatever the Wi-Fi Alliance says .11n is. In the interim, we continue to recommend MIMO products for those needing higher throughput, better range or improved performance over plain .11g implementations. But we urge caution with respect to the "draft n" products; today's noncompliant products are better performers.