by Paul Jay, CBC News Online

We had pretty much given up hope that the IEEE would ever approve wireless N - the latest version of the 802.11 wireless networking standard. But word has reached us via arstechnica that the second draft of wireless N was approved yesterday, putting us all a little closer to a final draft, expected in 2008.

Wireless N has been a bit of a headache for the technology industry because of repeated delays in approving the final draft of the new standard for Wi-Fi chips and routers. Companies that wanted to crank out faster and more robust Wi-Fi technology jumped on the first draft of standards, which in some cases led to potential communication problems between different versions of the pre-N technology.

But in January heavy hitters like Intel and Apple finally got tired of waiting for the final draft and announced they were coming out with their own wireless N tech. So it's hard to get excited about the IEEE's latest advance through a process that has been quite a slog. Perhaps they are communicating the information through a wireless B router?