Intel Finally Joins the 'WiFi' Wireless-Networking Brigade
By Jim Seymour
Special to TheStreet.com
08/29/2001 12:42 PM EDT
Often the things happening around the fringes of major tech conferences and trade shows are as interesting as -- and more important than -- the mainstream stuff on the main dais.
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I wouldn't say the peripheral news at this week's Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, Calif., has been more important than the mainstage events. Monday's announcement of deliveries on the 2GHz (gigahertz) Pentium 4 chip and of the aggressive pricing now in place across Intel's (INTC:Nasdaq - news - commentary) product line was genuinely big and important, but some of the other activity is pretty interesting.
Wednesday, for example, look for Intel to finally announce, a year late, that it's abandoning the feeble "HomeRF" standard for wireless networking, which it has been flogging shamelessly despite the overwhelming success of the competing standard, 802.11b. It's now joining the 802.11b corps.
Calling any of this "home networking" misses the point entirely. Wireless networking in general is an idea and a series of products whose time has come -- in the office, at home, in airports, conference centers, on college campuses and everywhere else.
It just so happens that the best, most affordable standard for wireless networking available today, the mainstream IEEE 802.11b standard -- also called, sadly, "WiFi" by its industry-promotion group -- happens to be fast enough, secure enough (if just barely), cheap enough and easy enough to install to attract home users.
You can bet that 802.11b products are having a huge impact in the office-networking market as well.
That's why it's been so strange that Intel has failed until now to abandon the loser in the race, HomeRF -- which is much slower and less secure, with shorter effective range and considerable problems -- to move to WiFi. (That moniker, incidentally, is supposed to stand for "wide fidelity," a phrase that, even absent the clumsy acronym, is still somewhere between misleading and meaningless.)
HomeRF's one tenuous advantage, cost, has been swept away in the move to 802.11b. Now, good 802.11b products are pushing under the $100 threshold. Yet Intel failed to respond to a clear decision by buyers.
At up to 10 megabits per second, with reliable reach up to 200 feet from each base station (and often as much as 300 feet) and with prices so low you see 802.11b equipment being sold as loss leaders at Best Buy, Circuit City and CompUSA, this is the standard that, at least for now, has taken over the market.
Intel will finally affirm that it understands what's been happening by showing a new line of Intel-branded 802.11b products -- cards for notebooks and desktop PCs, a transceiver/base station and, coming soon, a gateway box to connect your wireless system easily to a fast Net connection, either cable or DSL.
Intel actually announced support for 802.11b several months ago. Yet another of the Intel-networking mysteries, though, is why it has taken the chip giant so long to actually deliver those products.
It's also a mystery why Intel, now that it has finally joined Apple (AAPL:Nasdaq - news - commentary), Dell (DELL:Nasdaq - news - commentary), Cisco (CSCO:Nasdaq - news - commentary), Lucent (LU:NYSE - news - commentary) and many other major players in the 802.11b camp, has persisted in using its own name for these products: AnyPoint Wireless, a brand name long associated with its HomeRF line.
Actually, Intel has made a change: The 802.11b gear will be called AnyPoint Wireless II. (Thank God for Roman numerals, eh? Nothing like confusing the buyer at the moment of the sale.)
Thanks to its unflagging commitment for so long to an obvious loser, Intel has only an embarrassing 5% or so of the wireless-networking market, which is led by Linksys, D-Link (my favorite), Agere and others.
Better late than never? Maybe. But Intel has a long way to go in recovering standing and market share in this market.
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Tech note: Even 802.11b won't be the winner forever. There is much stirring right now in the wireless market, including growing interest in the faster but incompatible 802.11a standard and an alphabet soup of competition over the "next-next" likely winning standard, the faster and compatible 802.11g spec, once the dust settles in the war between wireless chipmakers Texas Instruments (TXN:NYSE - news - commentary) and Intersil (ISIL:Nasdaq - news - commentary).
RealMoney.com readers got a preview of that eventual migration in my column here in early May. Stay tuned for an update on the post-802.11b world here, soon.
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By the way, sharp-eyed readers spotted two mistakes, both all mine, in Tuesday's column on the IDF. Writing about Intel's new 2GHz Pentium 4 chip, I twice mistakenly wrote "2.4GHz," which is, of course, wrong.
Sorry, no hidden message there (as some suspected), no secret, superspeed 2.4GHz chips sneaking onto the market under the cover of my typos!
If only... |
