Leaks reported from some reasonably accurate sources say that 802.11n might be built into the next model of iPhone, along with chips to support the 7.2 Mbps HSPA flavor to which AT&T is currently upgrading its 3G network.
Could it be? Sure. But is it useful? Not so much yet.
802.11n was developed as a range and speed booster, employing multiple antennas and two or more radios to work over greater distances (sending a stronger signal, having better receiver sensitivity) and at greater speeds (improved encoding, multiple spatial paths, double-wide channels).
That's fine for laptops, desktops, and routers, but it's hard to cram that much radio technology into a battery-powered mobile device without making the time between charges unusably brief.
Meanwhile, chipmakers keep shipping hundreds of millions of commodity 802.11g chips, which they make no real money from, and which they have no interest in improving processes for.
That's where single-stream 802.11n comes in. With single-stream 802.11n, only a single radio and single antenna are used. This may seem odd to cut out most of the advantages of the standard - lurching its way to a 2010 ratification, by the way - but single stream still offers quite a lot.
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(E! Online)
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