Apple Implementing Newer Wi-Fi Standard In Next Gen iPhone?

Apple Implementing Newer Wi-Fi Standard In Next Gen iPhone?

New Wifi standard likely on next gen iPhone

It is interesting how much we can speculate from innocuous job postings.

One of our earlier job posting based speculations about Apple's ambitions for their native maps application turned out to be true as we recently learnt about the company developing their own version of Google Latitude.

Folks at Gizmodo have reported about one another job posting on the Apple website, which could give us an indication of what is to come in the next generation of iPhone
. In this posting for the position of a Wi-Fi Software Engineer for the iPhone team, Apple says they are looking for candidates with previous experience in "Implementation of 802.11 a/b/g/n & related specifications"

What does this mean? Well for starters, 802.11n is the newest standard for Wi-Fi connectivity, which promises much higher net throughput on your Wi-Fi network compared to the present standards. With an 802.11n supported chip, your iPhone can thus transfer data at a much higher rate.

However, this comes at the cost of higher battery power consumption and requires more processing speed. As a result, unless the iPhone processing platform as a whole is upgraded to handle this higher data throughput, it can prove counter-productive.

This is exactly the reason why Apple despite incorporating support for the 802.11n standard on iPod Touch is yet to make it active on the platform
. Now with this job posting and also with other earlier rumors that the new iPhone firmware could be a big upgrade from the present, chances are high that iPhone 4G will come with 802.11n support.

What do you think?