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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Mullens who wrote (44195)	1/17/2005 10:31:50 AM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 197218

It's interesting that Agere/TGn Sync's Cramer had said previously that she felt the WWiSE proposal didn't meet the requirements for RAND-Z, when arguably the biggest bit of IP offered by both groups is probably owned by WWiSE member Airgo Networks. That tech is MIMO-OFDM, the ability to send multiple bits of data on the same channels My patent research indicates that the CEO of Airgo, who has some of the patents, as well as his co-inventors, have assigned all their IPR to Cisco. The public record does not show Airgo as holding any IPR at all. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that there could be relevant Airgo IPR for which no public records exist. Perhaps Cisco and Airgo have some non-public arrangement, such as royalty-sharing or something similar. Perhaps it has to do with the ongoing relationship between the two: blog.networkmagazine.com Cisco’s Linksys division announced today that it has become the largest vendor yet to offer Wi-Fi hardware based on MIMO, a technology that uses several antennas to increase range and data rate. The announcement is a big win for Airgo Networks, whose chips are used in the Linskys gear. It’s also yet another boost for MIMO itself, already likely to be the most important technology in the future 802.11n standard. It isn’t such good news for enterprise users, as – like Belkin, the other U.S. vendor to ship MIMO products – Linksys is focused firmly on the home and small business market. Consumer Class There’s nothing wrong with the Wi-Fi gear from consumer-focused vendors, and it’s so cheap that some enterprises go ahead and use it anyway. According to the Dell’Oro Group, Linksys is Cisco’s largest “competitor” in enterprise Wi-Fi, with a bigger market share than any of the enterprise wireless vendors. However, the MIMO hardware from Linksys seems designed to discourage enterprises – understandably, as Cisco doesn’t want to cannibalize sales of the MIMO-less Aironet line. It’s only available in a router, rather than a standard access point (AP). And at $199, four times as much as other Linksys products, it’s not much cheaper than the “thin” APs from some of Cisco’s competitors. Further reducing their appeal to the enterprise, the Linksys and Belkin products support only 802.11g, not 802.11a. That makes a big difference for networks with a high user density, as 802.11a users the relatively wide and interference-free 5-GHz. band. It's also important for forward-compatability, because 802.11n will operate primarily (or perhaps exclusively) at 5 GHz. Further and Faster Like Belikin and Airgo, Linksys isn’t touting MIMO’s peak data rate. Instead, it says that the new product will offer range “up to 3 times further” and data rates “enhanced by up to 8 times”. Both these claims are very suspect: Airgo itself only talks about “doubling” the performance of standard 802.11g,and its peak data rate is still 108 Mbits/sec. However, there probably are rare circumstances in which speed is boosted eightfold. Thanks to poor radio reception, Wi-Fi networks rarely operate at their peak data rate, and 802.11g sometimes drops down to the slower 802.11b. But to see these gains, you’ll need to use MIMO at the client as well as the AP. For most users, this isn’t a realistic prospect: Airgo and Belkin do sell MIMO NICs, but they’re quite pricey and bulky. The biggest driver for Wi-Fi is that it’s now included in so many laptops, and that applies both at home and at work. More will become clear [or not] after the 1/21 meeting. And perhaps there will be more information after Q's 1/19 earnings call. I surely hope the analysts take up this point. It looks like Q may have played this game very shrewdly. WWiSE and TgnSync were the two major competitors. By developing its own proposal, knowing it was an underdog, Q could throw around a lot of weight in negotiating which one it would eventually back. It presumably got some decent concessions from TgnSync in exchange for its backing.