Is Wi-Fi Headed to an Early Grave?
12.08.06
By Mark Hachman
Is Wi-Fi dead as a standalone technology? According to Airgo chief executive Greg Raleigh, it is.
Airgo, which agreed to be acquired Monday by Qualcomm, helped pioneer the latest generation of Wi-Fi technology, called 802.11n. Although the technology is currently mired in a series of draft standards, analysts expect 802.11n to be completed next year.
For years, however, Wi-Fi has been what some call a "heart" technology, serving as the fundamental technology around which a product, such as a router or PC Card, has been designed. With the approval of 802.11n, however, Raleigh sees Wi-Fi losing its significance, and co-existing with WWAN technologies like the 3G EDGE telecom/data standard in routers and cards.
"The reason we're so excited at Airgo is that it's the next big step from Airgo," Raleigh said in an interview this week. "A year from now, forward from there, we expect the dominant technology to be WWAN plus WLAN. WLAN by itself is not going to be interesting."
Raleigh said that cellular companies require a much larger initial investment, leading to stability in the market. He said that customers have been telling them that they want WAN and LAN technologies on the same card.
Some Wi-Fi companies, such as Broadcom, have surrounded the technology with Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet, enterprise LAN switches, and other wired and wireless networking protocols in a bid to diversify. Others, like Atheros, have based most of their corporate revenues on Wi-Fi. Executives from both companies were unavailable to comment on this story, representatives said.
While Raleigh said that he sees Wi-Fi being rolled into a combination of cellular technologies, independent analyst Craig Settles said he believes Intel's weight will pull Wi-Fi into becoming a distribution mechanism for WiMAX. Intel said this week that it had demonstrated a combination mobile WiMAX chip in conjunction with Wi-Fi in Hong Kong, and that it would integrate the mobile WiMAX technology into cards by late 2007.
"I think if it goes anywhere, it will be based on Intel," Settles said. "I think it will roll into WiMAX in some form or another, largely because Intel is driving in that direction. Based on what they did with Centrino, their chances of succeeding seem fairly good."
Settles, who specializes in analyzing municipal broadband, said some cities, such as Grand Rapids, Ill., have even skipped Wi-Fi and deployed WiMAX-only deployments. That's important, he said, as users become used to interacting with WiMAX and not in using it as a behind-the-scenes backhaul technology.
Even as W-CDMA and related technologies constantly improve, Settles said consumers will demand throughput as close to wired cable modems as possible. ""750 Kbits down and 140 Kbits up – that's a pittance when you factor in voice over IP, and all the other things you do simultaneously online," he said.
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