Caroline Gabriel on Nokia and Intel's Other Wireless Partnerships
ArrayComm • Alcatel • AT&T • NextNet (Clearwire) • NTT DoCoMo • PicoChip • SKT • Sprint • Symbian • TTPcom
>> Intel Expands Its Partnerships for a Three-Pronged Bid for Ubiquitous Wireless
Caroline Gabriel
Research Director
Rethink Research Associates
June 27, 2005
wimaxtrends.com
In the first quarter, Intel achieved one of its key goals, taking the market lead in Wi-Fi chips. However, dominating Wi-Fi is just a relatively simple step on the way to far greater objectives – both driving technology and gaining mass market share across the whole wireless spectrum, in a bid to make Intel-based devices from laptops to sensors ubiquitous. Intel was talking up three key planks in this strategy this week – the creation of an advanced WiMAX platform, the emergence of its long awaited cognitive radio, and its plans for a more successful cellphone product line. All these are critical to the success of its bid to tower over wireless devices as it has over PCs, all are inter-related, and all carry high levels of risk.
One thing Intel is good at is spotting good technology partners among the more innovative start-ups. Thus we see it investing money in PicoChip, whose silicon will be the basis of the Intel WiMAX base station chipset, and forming a long expected close partnership with smart antenna specialist ArrayComm. Both of these will feed into the WiMAX program, which also includes technical input from far larger partners, notably Nokia, Alcatel, AT&T, Sprint and SKT, as well as Clearwire’s equipment unit NextNet. In contrast to its early behavior around Centrino, when Intel was widely criticized for trying to do everything inhouse before it had amassed the relevant expertise, with WiMAX it is amassing a powerful ecosystem around its own core product, the Rosedale client chipset.
PicoChip announced a $20.5m funding round this week, bringing it to a total of $41.5m to date, and making it second in the ranks of best funded European semiconductor start-ups, after Icera. Unsurprisingly, given their relationship, Intel Capital is one of the strategic investors in this round, joining new lead investor Scottish Equity Partners and another newcomer, Rothschild, and existing backers Pond Venture Partners and Atlas Venture. The new funding will be used to support the company’s growth in WiMAX and continue its original work of devising multi-network architectures.
PicoChip initially drew attention for its software defined radio (SDR) platform, which supports multiple networks within an adaptable base station, but recently has focused most of its efforts on WiMAX. It provides chips for the upcoming Intel base station platform and for equipment makers such as Airspan, with which it has created an SDR reference design for WiMAX base stations that can be software upgraded to the 802.16e mobile standard. It has also developed the world’s highest performance DSP tuned for wireless, and is a supplier of complete reference designs for WiMAX and HSDPA.
Guillaume d'Eyssautier, CEO of picoChip, commented: "We will use this funding to expand on picoChip’s success in WiMAX and deliver products for W-CDMA, TD-SCDMA and other wireless markets." It is hard to believe that this expertise will not be tapped into by Intel as it, too, broadens its span of networks. This raises the question of whether Intel will seek to provide chips for base stations outside the WiMAX world. It is an untried sector for the giant, but as mobile base stations shift from highly proprietary designs to rely on commoditized processors and reference platforms, and as they evolve towards software controlled units that support several networks simultaneously, it would be hard for Intel not to play in this sector. As Nokia always vociferously maintains, it is important for a company that is dominant in client devices also to have a foot in the base station camp, in order to influence that side of the equation and avoid being at the beck and call of the infrastructure makers. Assuming Intel takes this view too, there could be strong opportunities for further collaboration with PicoChip. It also puts the ever closer relationship between Intel and Alcatel on center stage. The two plan to announce an 802.16e base station early next year, supporting the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA), a standard that both support for building backbones, and presumably incorporating PicoChip silicon too.
The other key start-up in its WiMAX family is ArrayComm, whose smart antenna technology will be incorporated into the Intel client chipset for mobile 802.16e once that standard is ratified. The partnership has been in place since December but is now official, bringing ArrayComm’s Intellicell antennas and software to the Intel platform. ArrayComm’s antennas are incorporated in its own iBurst broadband wireless equipment, which it has sold to a few operators but will not migrate to support WiMAX, and they also power devices for the Japanese Personal Handyphone network and a similar system in China.
Although ArrayComm has scored some good wins for iBurst, notably in Australia, it has not gained the volume uptake to make it a viable contender for the mass market and may drop out of the equipment market, instead relying on gaining major acceptance for Intellicell in other vendors’ gear – an ambition for which the Intel deal is clearly invaluable.
Although Intel remains committed to smart antenna arrays based on the MIMO (Multiple In Multiple Out) technology – which will be part of future Wi-Fi standards and probably 802.16e profiles, and which boosts performance and range – Intellicell has its own unique advantages. Most importantly, it is highly spectrally efficient and so appeals to carriers building networks with limited spectrum allocations. Even more significantly, ArrayComm has been working on improving the RF propagation of WiMAX so that it works better with indoor subscriber units. This remains a key challenge for WiMAX – although companies like Airspan are starting to bring out the first indoor units, these do result in performance loss, which is heightened if the unit is portable or mobile.
Some of the WiMAX oriented work with ArrayComm is also likely to be applied to other projects in the future, notably the shift towards cognitive radio-based clients for multiple networks, and which will need ever more powerful and efficient designs.
Intel has been talking about its planned Adaptive Radio for two years, and has now unveiled the first fruits of that important R&D project. For almost as long as it has been in Wi-Fi, Intel has talked about creating a highly efficient all-CMOS radio that could adapt intelligently to different available networks. It has finally shown off a prototype of its first step in this direction, supporting all flavours of Wi-Fi (including the projected requirements of the upcoming 802.11n standard). In future years, it will be evolved into a full cognitive radio that can switch between many different networks automatically.
The product is an all-CMOS direct conversion dual-band radio transceiver, included in a highly integrated system-in-a-package that could support low cost, low footprint devices, says Intel, and so extend the reach and applications range for Wi-Fi
The prototype was presented as part of a technical paper at the Symposium on VLSI Technology in Kyoto, Japan, and the company also outlined the building blocks it has created to implement the multimode radio in a standard CMOS process.
"This system-in-a-package design uses more low-voltage circuitry than we've ever used in the past, which means we can integrate it and make it lower cost while operating at lower voltages and providing longer battery life," noted Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, director of Intel's Communications Circuits Research Lab. "The variable bandwidth of this solution extends capabilities beyond today's 20MHz to 100MHz, and is expected to support data rates higher than 100Mbps, which should allow people to enjoy multiple high quality video streams concurrently."
By keeping the underlying manufacturing technology tied to CMOS - the technology Intel uses to make all its microprocessors and other computer chips – it keeps manufacturing costs low and increases the potential to produce the radios in very high volumes at low cost, and integrating wireless capabilities into a far wider range of chip packages for different types of system.
Intel's plan for the future is to make cognitive chips that will support several different radios, for both local and wide area networks with smart antenna.
"The end goal is one single radio chip that can convert itself into a different chip. A reconfigurable radio," the symposium presentation said. "To get there, we need to take steps like the one announced today."
Intel’s cellphone chip efforts have been far less successful than those in Wi-Fi, but it is now close to launching its 3G platform, Hermon, and again, partners are important – from co-developer TTPcom, which makes the control software, to Japanese cellco NTT DoCoMo, which has also been working with Intel on 3G silicon as part of its bid to gain ownership of the whole handset creation process.
The key change in strategy this time around is a strong focus on developing reference platforms – ready-to-customize full-phone designs, which are becoming popular with handset makers to reduce development costs and time to market. By creating such platforms, Intel can offer those advantages and get its processors in by the back door, rather than trying to compete on the same playing field with the mighty Texas Instruments’ processors. Most important is its joint development with Nokia of a reference platform for SymbianOS, which brings Nokia’s Series 60 user interface layer to the Intel silicon and holds out the hope for Intel of driving a small wedge between Nokia and its closest partner, TI.
The Nokia-Intel axis is increasingly important as Nokia seeks to penetrate the enterprise client market that the chipmaker dominates, while the US giant aims to master its partner’s key area of expertise, mobility. This mutual interest has led to the Symbian/Hermon project and, even more recently, the joint development plan for mobile WiMAX client devices. Success in these two projects would lead naturally to cooperation on multi-network and cognitive handsets, a goal for both companies, an outcome that would give Intel one its best chances to take a driving seat in next generation mobile devices. (TI will also build Series 60 reference platforms using its Omap2 architecture.)
Intel will never have the control of the cellphone chip market that it enjoys in PCs and can realistically aim for in Wi-Fi and WiMAX. As a new player it cannot dictate prices as it can in computers, and Nokia and Motorola will not accept Intel’s terms as the PC makers once did. But the chip giant is playing a long game here. It mishandled the GSM chip market, and may fare better in 3G, but it will not be any threat to TI, Freescale and Qualcomm in the pure mobile handset chip sector. Where it aims to position itself – combining its control of the WiMAX process, its strong position in UltraWideBand/Wireless USB, and with two or three generations of cellphone experience under its belt at least – is as the leading provider of silicon for multiple network support and ubiquitous wireless. This is a huge ambition, and Intel has learned better than to try to do it all alone. Its growing web of partners – those with market weight and the start-ups with their technical innovation – will be an important factor in its progress. <<
>> WiMAX Alliance with Intel Shows Nokia Looking Beyond the Cellcos
Caroline Gabriel
Research Director
Rethink Research Associates
WiMAX Trends
June 13, 2005
wimaxtrends.com
The news that Nokia has formed a strategic alliance with Intel to develop and promote mobile WiMAX technologies is a massive psychological boost for the standard, just when it was looking to be suffering from over-hype of its potential as a mobile broadband network. Nokia, along with Ericsson, has been the great missing link in the WiMAX chain, an absence widely assumed to be down to sensitivity to its major customer base, the 3G operators. The reawakened interest of Nokia in a technology it once pioneered demonstrates two key facts – that the Finnish giant is looking to cast its net far wider than the cellular operators in future; and that the next generation of communication will bridge 3GPP and broadband wireless platforms, however painful that may be for those 3G cellcos.
Nokia, with the OFDM Forum and the now-defunct Ensemble, actually set up the WiMAX Forum in 2001, to commercialize the IEEE 802.16 standards family. However, in those days it was mainly looking at WiMAX as a backhaul technology (a role that is still important for the first generation 802.16-2004 equipment), and it appeared to become disenchanted once the focus switched – under the heavy steering of Intel from 2003 – to creating a laptop-based, portable and eventually mobile network that could potentially squeeze 3G and become a foundation for 4G, one not controlled by the 3GPP, Nokia’s traditional sphere of influence and intellectual property. The Finnish company even briefly left the WiMAX Forum altogether, and when it rejoined, took an inactive role, despite various R&D projects in its laboratories focused on WiMAX in handsets.
These early R&D efforts will be accelerated under the Intel alliance, which is specifically focused on mobility. If there was every any truth in the theory that Nokia was trying to undermine mobile WiMAX and position the technology purely as a fixed last mile platform, that approach has clearly changed. This is not merely a company keeping its options open. Nokia could have continued to do some low key R&D and stayed away from aggressive statements, as Ericsson has so far done. But the Intel partnership is a strong endorsement of WiMAX, promising, as the companies’ statement put it, to “accelerate the development, adoption and deployment of WiMAX technology, helping to bring new capabilities and data services to mobile users over high speed broadband networks.
The companies will collaborate on several areas in support of mobile WiMAX technology (IEEE 802.16e) including mobile clients, network infrastructure, industry enabling efforts and market development. For mobile devices and notebook platforms, Intel and Nokia will work closely to identify and deliver the unique power and performance requirements of the technology, and will work on base station strategies to help deploy a WiMAX network infrastructure that will provide adequate and reliable coverage. In addition, the companies will engage in market development efforts to demonstrate to service providers and the industry how WiMAX can enhance data service capabilities of the network while complementing existing 3G networks.”
The emphasis may be on complementing 3G, but Nokia’s change of heart will not have been down to any pressure from Nokia’s key cellco customers, many of whom still regard WiMAX with deep suspicion, but fits well into the vendor’s recent strong indications that it will look beyond that core base for growth, even at the risk of offending some of its largest clients. Nokia has been searching for a way to lessen its dependence on the huge 3G cellcos, which have increasingly shifted the balance of power in handset design, pricing and branding in their own favor over the past few years, by setting the low cost white label manufacturers and the more operator-compliant Asian vendors against Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. The world handset leader has taken various routes – an enterprise push that pivots on partners like IBM and reduces the cellcos to the role of bit carriers; and the creation of devices that can be sold equally effectively through retail and wireline operator channels as through mobile carriers, notably the high end media devices and the recently announced internet tablet, which has no cellular connection. This Wi-Fi/Linux hybrid between a sub-notebook PC and a handset could well be a model for an early WiMAX device.
And such devices, running voice over IP and broadband data services, will appeal greatly not only to enterprise users but to another sector on which Nokia has its eye, the non-mobile broadband providers. Like Ericsson, Nokia needs to stop being perceived as a mobile-only manufacturer and position itself for the world of converged wireline/wireless networks. Like the internet tablet, it will see a WiMAX device as a way to penetrate the accounts of the broadband ISPs and the telcos such as British Telecom or BellSouth that are looking to use WiMAX as a key wireless element of their multi-network roll-outs.
This is foreign territory for the 3G-oriented Nokia, hence the tie-up with Intel, which will bring it into the increasingly powerful inner circle of friends that the chipmaker is putting together around WiMAX and IP – Sprint, AT&T, Clearwire, Alcatel, Siemens and others. All these are interested in mobile WiMAX, all believe medium term success will depend on having more device choices than just a laptop card – and yet the creation of a WiMAX handset or mini-tablet is one of the great risk factors associated with the standard. Intel has promised a handset chipset around 2007, but there is widespread scepticism about the claim, with question marks over about who would use such a chip, and how could the devices be attractive, battery-efficient and cost effective enough for the mass market, while being able to tap into the full data rates of the network, especially in current spectrum profiles? Such issues remain critical, but there will be greater confidence that Nokia can address at least some of them than most other vendors in the market.
For Intel, of course, this is a dream that it grasped at when, in 2003, it threw its weight behind the WiMAX Forum and briefly seemed to be forming an axis with Nokia that symbolized the coming together of the PC/IP world and that of mobile communications. While that convergence has progressed inexorably, the two giants’ routes diverged until now, but finally Intel has the prospect of signing up the world’s largest mobile device maker for its chipsets (though Nokia stressed this was not necessarily part of the deal) as well as boosting the credibility of its promises about mobile broadband.
The activities of Nokia should also help speed up the finalization of the 802.16e standard within the IEEE and hasten the day of the multi-radio handset and base station, supporting both cellular and WiMAX networks. In an ideal world, this goal would appeal to everyone. The 3G technologies and their successors, and the WiMAX family, have their own particular strengths and weaknesses, and as the former move towards an OFDM and IP base for the fourth generation, there is no logical reason why the various networks should not converge, allowing operators to exploit the benefits of both. Nokia pointed to urban hotzones, where cellular networks can become over congested, as good places for a complementary WiMAX network.
This utopia, where operators of all hues adopt multi-network strategies, of course disregards the fact that, until total convergence is practical – perhaps a decade away – there will be tension between the two technologies. They may be made to work effectively together through developments like adaptive radios, Unlicensed Mobile Access, software defined base stations and so on, but the companies that paid millions of dollars for 3G licenses will continue to embrace open IP broadband networks reluctantly because of the potential impact on their ARPU, while operators without cellular licenses will be keen to present WiMAX as a ‘3G killer’ in order to strengthen their services against those of the cellcos.
In this situation, it will be a hard balancing act for Nokia to chase the new customers while retaining the old. It was careful to stress that its 3GPP technologies remain the core of its portfolio and to remind the world that it has heavy investment in developments to enhance UMTS, such as its i-HSPA ‘flat network’ for IP, its roll-out of the 3.5G technology HSDPA, and its involvement in the so-called ‘Super 3G’ or ‘3.9G’ projects.
But unlike some of its key clients, it has accepted that the world will move towards OFDM and IP, and that a strong position in that will depend on breaking beyond the cellcos. Some of its rivals, notably Qualcomm and Nortel, are seeking to wrest the OFDM/IP tiller away from WiMAX and create a similar platform within the auspices of the 3GPP. The fact that Nokia is taking a different path and seeking to bridge the 3GPP and IEEE worlds is not only a massive relief to WiMAX, but shows that the Finnish company no longer wants to be confined within the cellular market, however large, but to reinvent itself as a provider of communications to customers of all types, from enterprises to ISPs and converged services providers. This readiness to turn its back on its own most sacred cows is what sets Nokia apart from most of its rivals, and its embracing of mobile WiMAX, though not without pain, will prove to be a vital part of its strategy for growth. <<
- Eric - |
