In order to speed up the development of the 802.11n standard, 27 companies have formed the EWC (Enhanced Wireless Consortium) on October 10, 2005. Participants include Atheros Communications, Cisco, Intel, Sony, Apple, Broadcom, Conexant, Linksys, LitePoint, Marvell, Metalink, Toshiba, USRobotics, and WildPackets. Taiwanese players, Airoha, D-Link, Ralink, Real-tek, Winbond, and ZyDAS have also joined, as has Lenovo in China. EWC will include recommendations proposed by TGn Sync and WwiSE jointly, two competing IEEE 802.11n task groups.

 

802.11n provides two- to ten-fold increase in data transmission speed and its compatibility with current Wi-Fi standards ensures applications on both future and present Wi-Fi equipment. The 802.11n standard is expected to completed in 2007, with the first batch of pre-n products to come out in 2006.