Most current wireless LAN products operate in the 2.4GHz range and many analysts worry that the band will be too crowded as Bluetooth products join spectrum already occupied by microwave and cordless phones. Various companies are currently working to bring a much faster and, reportedly, more reliable standard. The new technology uses the 5GHz band with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing that breaks the wireless channel into subfrequencies transmitted at low parallel rates which are put back together at the receiver. Scheduled to appear by the middle of next year, it could eventually support multimedia and other broadband applications. Lucent, 3Com, Nortel, Cisco, Apple, and others have bet that 802.11b wireless LAN products will prevail.

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