Intel Pursuing Much Faster Home Internet Access
nytimes.com
January 22, 2004
By JOHN MARKOFF
AN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 21 - Intel, the world's largest computer chip maker, is pushing forward with a new wireless technology that it says it believes can bring extremely high-speed Internet access to American homes, a promise once offered by fiber optic networks.
Sean Maloney, general manager of Intel's wireless division, said on Wednesday that Intel saw enormous promise in a new technology known as WiMax and would produce chips that use that technology.
...
"It looks like the Internet in 1994," he said. "The next 10 years will be defined by broadband wireless."
Intel is hoping that broad deployment of the WiMax standard will allow it to repeat the success it has had selling its Centrino microprocessor chip, which uses Wi-Fi, or 802.11 technology. Intel has spent $300 million in the last year advertising its Centrino wireless technology for portable computers, and its venture capital arm, Intel Capital, has invested more than $4 billion in a range of wireless data ventures.
While Wi-Fi is now the international standard for home and office wireless networking, Intel executives say they believe that WiMax, or 802.16 technology, can have an equal or greater impact on the future of data transmission.
Indeed, the recent Consumer Electronics Show, held this month in Las Vegas, was a showcase for wireless technologies that are being used in everything from hand-held video players to televisions. And last week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, Intel showed a digital movie that was broadcast wirelessly to large flat-panel displays, demonstrating wireless video transmission.
"Most people don't think of them this way, but we believe that Intel is one of the most important companies," said Craig J. Mathias, a principal analyst with the Farpoint Group, a wireless industry consulting firm based in Ashland, Mass. "They will do to the wireless industry what they have done in computing."
Intel's strategy has long been to nurture computer applications to drive up consumer demand for more powerful computer chips. But the relatively slow adoption of broadband Internet access to the home, Mr. Maloney said, has delayed the widespread use of advanced applications like video-on-demand via the Internet that require high-speed connections.
He said that 65 percent of American households with Internet access still do not have broadband connections, and that hopes for broader deployment of high-speed fiber optic lines were fading. "There is no great fiber build-out going on," he said. "Some kind of wireless capacity is necessary to reach the last mile."
The time for laying fiber optic lines to the home has passed, he argued, because deployment costs have skyrocketed in recent years. It can now cost as much as $300 a foot to lay fiber optic lines.
During his speech and afterward in an interview, Mr. Maloney acknowledged that WiMax technology was not yet proven and that the radio spectrum needed to deploy the new technology at reasonable costs was not yet available.
*****
The company said it had run a small test of an early version of WiMax in Plano, Tex., last fall and would conduct larger-scale urban trials in 2005. Intel recently placed a WiMax antenna on top of its corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., and Mr. Maloney said he was able to receive a 7-megabit data signal - enough to view high-definition television- from the hills above Silicon Valley, more than 12 miles away. |
