Intel gung ho on WiFi. Article from New York Times: nytimes.com
< UN VALLEY, Idaho, July 11 — Is the Wi-Fi boom about to bust? Even though that has lately become the fashionable view, the answer is probably no.
Critics argue that there are too many competitors trying to deliver high-speed wireless connections to the Internet. Prices for most commercial Wi-Fi services are too high, they say, and free or subsidized operations abound, including those like the one McDonald's started rolling out last week at its fast food restaurants in San Francisco. [Page C7.]
All this will make it practically impossible, the skeptics insist, for anyone to build a profitable business in Wi-Fi, a short-range wireless radio technology that frees personal computers from their physical tethers to the Internet.
But a number of true believers in Wi-Fi were present at this mountain resort during an annual conference, organized by the investment banker Herbert Allen, that brings together technology, media and entertainment industry leaders. The Intel Corporation in particular is betting a lot of money on Wi-Fi. And that may be exactly what the new technology needs to succeed.
Intel's two top executives, Craig R. Barrett and Andrew S. Grove, were here this year to preach the virtues of Wi-Fi, in the belief that it will be a powerfully disruptive force in the telecommunications industry.
It has certainly been a disruptive force at Intel. The industry and analysts have focused their attention on the current frenzy to build wireless Internet locations, known as hot spots, at airports, coffeehouses and hotels. But Intel has a much bolder wireless plan: it wants to close the so-called last-mile gap between homes and the Internet backbone with cheap, super-fast connections so that businesses can deliver interactive entertainment and a host of other digital products and services right into America's living rooms and dens.
The new Intel bet is remarkable given that the company initially backed the wrong wireless standard, putting its resources behind a competing standard known as Home RF.
But Intel, the world's biggest maker of computer chips, changed its strategy after its executives realized the power and potential pervasiveness of the unregulated Wi-Fi wireless networking standard, technically know as the 802.11 standard.
The Wi-Fi standard was developed and commercialized at Apple Computer as early as 1999. Ultimately, though, it gained widespread popularity on its own, Mr. Barrett acknowledged in an interview here, as a grass-roots, from-the-bottom-up movement.
That success stands in striking contrast to top-down wireless data strategies, like the 3G cellular approach pushed by the telecommunications industry, which has so far been an expensive bust.
Mr. Barrett now says that people who predict a Wi-Fi shakeout are missing the point, as well as failing to see the deeper implications of the technology.
"What is missing is the realization of how many legs this technology has," he said.
In the three months since Intel introduced its wireless PC chips, the company has come to dominate the Wi-Fi market. It is now putting Wi-Fi circuitry in all of its chip sets for portable computers, investing widely in Wi-Fi industry start-ups and spending almost its entire annual marketing budget in a $300 million advertising campaign trumpeting the virtues of its unwired Centrino brand.
"Intel has raised the level of the water and is floating all the boats," said Glenn Fleishman, editor of Wi-Fi Networking News, a Web-based daily newsletter.
Of even greater potential import, Intel plans to start a test in Texas in a few months that will use a combination of wireless technologies, including Wi-Fi, to bring broadband Internet connections directly to homes.
Last week the company quietly announced that it was teaming with a small equipment maker, Alvarion, of Tel Aviv, Israel, to back a free wireless standard, 802.16, that is intended to send data over distances of as much as 30 miles and at speeds of up to 70 megabits a second.
The data rate is high enough to comfortably stream high-definition television video broadcasts, and the range makes it possible to quickly deploy a system in a large urban or suburban area.
By comparison, current Wi-Fi technology is limited to several hundred feet and speeds of 11 megabits a second. The Intel test, however, will explore using the 802.16 standard, known as WiMax, to distribute the data to Wi-Fi antennas in local neighborhoods. ...continued... >
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