Until this year, enterprises have stood firm about waiting for final IEEE standards ratification before deploying the 802.11n wireless LANs. However, according to the recently published 2008 Webtorials Wireless LAN State-of-the-Market Report Series, they have grown far more willing to install "Draft N" products ahead of standards.

This year’s survey, sponsored by Motorola and authored by yours truly, polled several hundred members of the Webtorials online subscriber base involved in their organizations’ WLAN implementations. In 2007, a full two thirds (66%) of respondents said they’d wait for standards before deploying 802.11n. This year, that number dropped to just 41%. Similarly, last year, just 1% of respondents said they had the bandwidth needs to commercially deploy 11n ahead of standards; by contrast, 16% of 2008 respondents said they need the bandwidth now.

Finally, another 22% this year said they’d deploy ahead of standards in pilots or limited areas of the company, up 7% from the 15% who would consider doing so in 2007. In all, 38% said this year they would deploy Draft 11n products in some form, compared to just 16% in 2007.

This is a pretty big jump. What’s up? Just good marketing?

Partly. But the numbers also reflect the changing mobile capacity needs of enterprises, which cite adding mobile VoIP and collaborative applications to their Wi-Fi data loads as among the drivers behind their 11n needs. Other factors are the Wi-Fi Alliance’s interoperability certification of pre-standard products – providing a measure of investment protection comfort – and a sluggish formal standards process.

Currently, the 11n standard is expected in fourth-quarter 2009. Holdups are due, in part, to a large number of optional features to be defined, as well as dissent over whether channel-bonded, 40MHz 11n operation should be permissible in the 2.4GHz band.

Given that the big economic drop occurred after the August poll, I’d like to ask all of you a follow-up question: Is the belt-tightening caused by the current economic climate affecting your plans to deploy Draft 802.11n? If so, how? Write me or post a reply in the Network World Wireless Alert community area following this article.

Meanwhile, to view the 2008 State-of-the-Market report series (published in multiple, shorter segments this year), click here.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.