Westlake Village (CA) - Today at Noon Pacific Time, the 802.11n task group voted to accept the Joint Proposal as the basis for Draft One of the new standard. According to a release from Airgo Networks, the vote today was decided by a 184 to 0 margin with four abstentions.

The approval hopefully marks the end to the rancor that has marred the work toward the draft and will replace it with good old fashioned marketing hype as chipmakers rush to announce the "first" draft 11n compliant chipsets.

Airgo's statement attempted to set the expectation that "it will take just over a year to move from Draft 1.0 to 11n ratification". The company also asserted that "claims that chip sets based on any early draft will be firmware upgradeable to the final 11n specification are irresponsible"

As if to fire a shot across Airgo's bow, competitor Broadcom rushed out a release shortly after Airgo's announcing its "Intensi-fi" family of wireless LAN chipsets, which it claims are "the first solutions designed to comply with the IEEE 802.11n draft specification".

Given that Atheros and Marvell gave private demonstrations of "EWC" chipsets at CES only a few weeks ago, it probably won't be long until they issue their own releases trumpeting chipsets compliant with the 11n draft spec.