Mobile working Toolkit

Intel gets behind 'Wi-Fi on steroids'

Tags:
Spectrum,
Mobile,
WiBro,
WiMax

David Meyer ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 24 Jul 2006 13:00 BST

... in the silicon, but we found we could actually make it pin-compatible, which was great [it solders down onto same piece of fibreglass]. We also found that we could keep the 16d compatibility, making it a bridge device.

We introduced a radio component called Ofer-R [dual-mode WiMax/Wi-Fi technology], and that's a single-chip radio device that goes with Rosedale and drives the costs and integration down for modem devices.

How would you respond to Qualcomm's Europe president, Andrew Gilbert, who recently said he found it hard to see where mobile WiMax would fit into the market by the time it became available?
It's good that HSxPA techs are progressing, but if you look at where they are in terms of bandwidth and cost per bit, we believe WiMax has a significant advantage in both those areas, and also in terms of quality of service and reliability.

Qualcomm obviously has intellectual property rights in the HSxPA and CDMA technologies, and one of the advantages with WiMax is that the intellectual property rights are spread fairly evenly across the technology, so no one company has a controlling interest in royalties, so that reduces the costs significantly.

Qualcomm has also made an investment in OFDM technologies [which form a basis for mobile WiMax], and if you look at most of the people looking at "4G", they all agree it's based on OFDM. We think WiMax is there in terms of OFDM and is the basis for a solid data network — it's possibly closer than you think.

We've definitely seen technology and prototype demonstrations of mobile WiMax. We're seeing trial deployment of mobile WiMax in South Korea. Field trials and early commercial trials [will reach Europe] towards the end of this year.

The GSM Association is opposing technology neutrality in key bands of spectrum — how is the fight for usable mobile WiMax spectrum going?
That's possibly a strategy they're using, but it's not true of all the operators, by the way. What Intel is doing is lobbying for technology neutrality and access to the 2.5GHz spectrum across the EU and worldwide. Regulators are becoming a lot more open to that discussion.

Obviously they move relatively slowly, but we're seeing acceptance within the regulators for the possibility of technology neutrality in a 2.5 band, and a compromise position of using the centre gap frequencies [earmarked by the GSM Association for 3G extensions] is possible.

Do you think there is a valid case for reserving those frequencies for 3G services?
3G was mainly designated for data traffic, but is largely being used for voice traffic with a small portion of data on top of that. There is an argument saying they should be allowed to provide services in that spectrum [but] whether they should be allowed to preclude other people from using that spectrum is a different matter.

Let the market decide which is the best technology for providing those services. They do have a reasonable amount of spectrum today and I don't believe that spectrum is being used to anything like its capacity at the moment, so there's certainly growth opportunities there.

WiMax is very spectrally efficient — so maybe when we look at long-term evolution [future incarnations of 3G technologies] and 4G...