Internally, China has promoted homegrown technical specifications for many years, but has only recently sought worldwide acceptance of themâ€â€and the current process is not going well. Chinese engineers want to see their own WAPI standard adopted as the official ISO successor to WiFi, but they're facing stiff competition from a rival technology, 802.11i, which is backed by Intel, among others. After losing out to 802.11i back in March, WAPI backers have refused to give up and have just appealed the ISO's decision.
While this in itself might not be front-page news, the Chinese engineers have also stepped up a war of words and now accuse (PDF) the US-based IEEE of "conspiracy," "unethical activities," and "cultural chauvinism," among other strongly-worded charges. The anger is coming from the Broadband Wireless Internet Protocol Standard Group (BWIPS), the Chinese consortium backing WAPI, which feels like the IEEE has been out to sabotage them at the ISO in order to promote their own 802.11i technology. BWIPS outlined its grievances to Chinese news agency Xinhua after the vote in March:
"We have noticed that during the comment and balloting periods, American IEEE and its representatives have used a lot of dirty tricks including deception, misinformation, confusion and reckless charging to lobby against WAPI," said ChinaBWIPS in its statement.
