During a presentation at the Globalcom 2006 Expo in San Francisco on Tuesday Intel revealed that they will be using the 802.11n pre-standard wireless into their Centrino chips by next year.

The standard is not expected to be solidified by 2008 and is supposed to give users much higher performance than current wireless cards. Currently 802.11n hardware is on the shelves, but has been dogged by interoperability problems. Numerous tests with the hardware shows that different manufactures of the hardware are not compatible with each other.

Hopefully the widespread use of the Centrino line will get all hardware vendors in line with a compatible hardware.

Either way. If you have purchased 802.11n wireless gear, most likely it will have problems with these new laptops. This standard has really been all over the place. If you are planning a corporate wireless network I would stay away from these as long as possible – It will probably be the end of 2008 before we see a compatible set of products by different vendors.