Thursday, December 02, 1999
Cisco claims its product is superior to
Wi-Lan's
'Fixed wireless': Calgary firm threatens suit if patent
infringed
Simon Avery, with files from Carol Howes
Financial Post
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Cisco Systems Inc. yesterday insisted that its company's
new wireless technology is superior and completely independent of the wireless efforts
of Calgary-based Wi-Lan Inc., which has threatened to sue Cisco if it finds Cisco is
infringing on its patents.
"We're aware of Wi-Lan. We've looked at what they're doing. It's quite different from
what we're doing," said Gregory Raleigh, director of wireless engineering at Cisco.
"[Wi-Lan] has a similar acronym and how they describe their technology. But it's very,
very different from what we're doing. We believe what we're doing offers a substantial
performance enhancement."
Cisco yesterday demonstrated its new equipment, which it says will bring wireless
voice, video and high-speed Internet access to businesses and homes as early as next
year.
Mr. Raleigh, who joined Cisco last year after Cisco bought his high-speed wireless
firm Clarity Wireless Corp. for $157-million in stock, said Cisco has been developing
its new wireless product for the last four years and has about 200 engineers assigned to
the project (all figures in U.S. dollars).
Wi-Lan executives were travelling yesterday and unavailable for comment. They plan to
showcase their own wireless technology today, just down the road from Cisco's head
office in San Jose, Calif.
Both companies are hoping to capitalize on the nascent market known as "fixed
wireless", where remote antenna towers send data to subscribers equipped with
pizza-sized dishes. By boosting the flow of data by as much as 1000 times what regular
cell phones transmit, engineers say fixed wireless can transmit and receive data at
speeds that match broadband cable and DSL phone services.
Both Cisco and Wi-Lan use technology called orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing, but Cisco claims its version does away with the need for a line of sight
between the subscriber and the transmission tower, a crucial requirement to give the
service mass market appeal.
Cisco will sell each new equipment package for $150,000, which will enable businesses
and service providers to connect about 3,000 people to the Internet as well as delivering
them voice-over-IP and video.
By some analysts' estimates, the market for all types of high-speed Internet access
could hit $8 billion by 2002, with fixed wireless claiming about 10% of that.
"This is very much a multi-billion opportunity," Steven Smith, Cisco's wireless
marketing manager, told analysts yesterday.
Much of the growth in fixed wireless is expected to come from long-distance carriers
who have so far been shut out of the boom in providing Internet access through local
phone lines and cable.
Together, Sprint Corp. and MCI WorldCom Inc., which are proposing a $115-billion
merger, reach about 60% of U.S. homes through their existing wireless spectrums and
have announced plans to introduce high-speed, wireless Internet access in as many as
20 North American markets by the end of next year. |
