This is pretty exciting. I am looking forward to broadband connectivity anywhere in my city. Looks to be coming soon.
Intel, partners heat up the race for WiMax
Antone Gonsalves
(09/20/2007 6:00 AM EDT)
URL: eetimes.com
The race to install citywide wireless networks is turning into a horse race lately between Intel and its partners going neck and neck with wireless carriers.
Case in point: Sprint Nextel on Wednesday said it expects to have WiMax available in "30ish" U.S. markets covering a population of 100 million people about the same time Intel releases its next-generation mobile chipset that will embed the wireless technology in notebooks.
Executives from WiMax partners Sprint, Clearwire, and Intel met with reporters and analysts at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco to provide an update on their efforts to drive WiMax adoption in the United States. Sprint and Clearwire, which counts Intel as an investor, are building a nationwide WiMax network.
Atish Gude, senior VP for Sprint's WiMax business operations, said the company expected to be in "30ish" U.S. markets by the time Intel releases Montevina next year, covering an area of 100 million people. Montevina is the codename for a chipset that will provide Wi-Fi and WiMax support in notebooks.
Sprint expects 80% of its WiMax transmitters to overlay its cellular transmission stations, Gude said. The remaining 20% would be new sites.
John Saw, chief technology officer for Clearwire, declined to say how many markets the company would be in at that time. The company, however, plans to start a 145 square-mile test of WiMax in the Portland, Ore., area this year, making it generally available over a 700 square mile area, which will reach into Vancouver, Wash., next year. Clearwire's current wireless broadband uses an OFDM transmission protocol.
Supporters of WiMax, which is similar to Wi-Fi, but can cover a far larger area, got a boost recently when Earthlink said that it was cutting its workforce and effectively abandoning the municipal Wi-Fi market. Nevertheless, WiMax faces competition from wireless carriers, such as Verizon and AT&T, which are also building out Web-enabled cellular networks.
Even though WiMax deployment is still in the early stages, Sprint and Clearwire believe they can take a sizable chunk of the wireless Internet by delivering a bigger pipe than wireless carriers at a better price. In addition, surfing the Web on a WiMax network would be the same as on a wired connection at the home or office.
"It's like comparing a one-lane highway to a 10-lane highway," Gude said. "We believe that broadband is about delivering not just the right speed, but a consistency of throughput over a wide variety of applications."
Saw also argued that cellular technology is more limited in the amount of data it can deliver. "There will come a time when they will run into a brick wall called spectrum," he said.
Neither company expected to subsidize WiMax devices in the way wireless carriers take a loss on mobile phones to get people to sign up for two-year service contracts. The variety of Internet-enabled devices expected to tap into a WiMax network would be too great to make subsidies practical. "We don't envision a time when we would push subsidies," Saw said "How do you subsidize a camera with a WiMax chip."
Intel has been a staunch supporter of the WiMax technology for metro and rural areas. During his Tuesday keynote at IDF, Intel chief executive Paul Otellini estimated 1.3 billion people would be covered by WiMax worldwide by 2012. Laptop makers that have agreed to ship notebooks with Montevina include Lenovo, Acer, Asus, Panasonic and Toshiba.
Intel's vision is not isolated to North America. Otellini also announced a joint venture with KDDI, East Japan Railway, Kyocera, Daiwa Securities Group, and the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ to build a WiMax network in Japan.
|
