Intel Pursuing Much Faster Home Internet Access

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 06:40:11 -0800
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>

Intel Pursuing Much Faster Home Internet Access
By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: January 22, 2004
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/technology/22chip.html>


SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 21 - Intel, the world's largest computer chip maker,
is pushing forward with a new wireless technology that it says it believes
can bring extremely high-speed Internet access to American homes, a promise
once offered by fiber optic networks.

Sean Maloney, general manager of Intel's wireless division, said on
Wednesday that Intel saw enormous promise in a new technology known as WiMax
and would produce chips that use that technology. At a speech on the opening
day of an annual technical symposium sponsored by the Wireless
Communications Association, a trade organization of equipment makers, Mr.
Maloney said that growth in wireless communications would be as fast as the
Internet expansion of the mid-1990's.

"It looks like the Internet in 1994," he said. "The next 10 years will be
defined by broadband wireless."

Intel is hoping that broad deployment of the WiMax standard will allow it to
repeat the success it has had selling its Centrino microprocessor chip,
which uses Wi-Fi, or 802.11 technology. Intel has spent $300 million in the
last year advertising its Centrino wireless technology for portable
computers, and its venture capital arm, Intel Capital, has invested more
than $4 billion in a range of wireless data ventures.

While Wi-Fi is now the international standard for home and office wireless
networking, Intel executives say they believe that WiMax, or 802.16
technology, can have an equal or greater impact on the future of data
transmission.

Indeed, the recent Consumer Electronics Show, held this month in Las Vegas,
was a showcase for wireless technologies that are being used in everything
from hand-held video players to televisions. And last week at the Sundance
Film Festival in Utah, Intel showed a digital movie that was broadcast
wirelessly to large flat-panel displays, demonstrating wireless video
transmission.

"Most people don't think of them this way, but we believe that Intel is one
of the most important companies," said Craig J. Mathias, a principal analyst
with the Farpoint Group, a wireless industry consulting firm based in
Ashland, Mass. "They will do to the wireless industry what they have done in
computing."

Intel's strategy has long been to nurture computer applications to drive up
consumer demand for more powerful computer chips. But the relatively slow
adoption of broadband Internet access to the home, Mr. Maloney said, has
delayed the widespread use of advanced applications like video-on-demand via
the Internet that require high-speed connections.

He said that 65 percent of American households with Internet access still do
not have broadband connections, and that hopes for broader deployment of
high-speed fiber optic lines were fading. "There is no great fiber build-out
going on," he said. "Some kind of wireless capacity is necessary to reach
the last mile."

The time for laying fiber optic lines to the home has passed, he argued,
because deployment costs have skyrocketed in recent years. It can now cost
as much as $300 a foot to lay fiber optic lines.

During his speech and afterward in an interview, Mr. Maloney acknowledged
that WiMax technology was not yet proven and that the radio spectrum needed
to deploy the new technology at reasonable costs was not yet available.

He also conceded that efforts during the last decade to provide wireless
data transmission using other technologies had largely ended in commercial
failure.

"This stuff is obviously difficult," he said. "You have every right to ask
how are we going to do this. You have the right to be skeptical."

Mr. Maloney also noted that the cost of deploying wireless connections was
sharply higher when the service was offered at higher radio frequencies,
because more antennas were needed to cover the same area. The frequencies
available for new technologies are generally higher ones, which offer less
than optimal performance over longer distances; most of the more desirable
parts of the spectrum have been licensed for other uses.

Still, Mr. Maloney said he was confident that WiMax would catch on, because
it could offer competition to cable and telephone companies selling
high-speed Internet access. Intel has announced several American equipment
partners for its WiMax technology and is working with eight foreign
telecommunications service providers. But it has not announced any partners
in the United States to offer service.

The company said it had run a small test of an early version of WiMax in
Plano, Tex., last fall and would conduct larger-scale urban trials in 2005.
Intel recently placed a WiMax antenna on top of its corporate headquarters
in Santa Clara, Calif., and Mr. Maloney said he was able to receive a
7-megabit data signal - enough to view high-definition television- from the
hills above Silicon Valley, more than 12 miles away.

Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>

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