Wireless

Intel Losing the WiMAX Market?

After supporting the standard, Intel loses interest

By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor

3rd of September 2007, 10:24 GMT

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WiMAX is one of the several wireless networking standards that are active at the present time across the world and it has been heavily supported by the computer hardware manufacturing giant Intel since 2004. Since then it looks like Intel lost some of its interest in the new wireless standard as it now has a "backseat" position on the WiMAX market while smaller companies like Beceem, Sequans and Runcom are taking the lead in developing 802.16e compliant

chips.

The smaller manufacturing companies interested in the new wireless standard are quite aggressive in their marketing policies having already established a number of alliances and partnerships with system integrators and vendors as well with customer premise equipment makers. While a number of these companies were field testing and heavily developing chips and networking solutions which support the 802.16e Wave 1 standard since the last year, with a number of chips already in commercial production, Intel is not expected to unveil its 802.16e Wave 1 chips until September 2007, according to information from the news site digitimes.

The second developing stage of the WiMAX wireless standard, the 802.16e Wave 2, is already being implemented by other than Intel chip manufacturers and those solutions are now in the testing phases and mass production is expected to start in the last months of the year and to reach maximum speed in 2008. Just like Intel, a handful of other big hardware manufacturing companies like Broadcom, Marvel and Texas Instruments are not yet decided if to fully commit to the new wireless standard.

While Intel is one of the major supporters of the new technology and while it currently integrates WiMAX compliant chips in notebooks and laptops, it did not leave however a major footprint on the retail wireless LAN market, so in the near future the company is expected to make efforts to address the situation. Intel's marketing campaign for WiMAX started in 2006 and since then the manufacturing company inked a number of partnerships with service providers from the United States and the United Kingdom in an attempt to dominate a large market share when its own wireless chips will become available.

TAGS:

Intel | wireless | WiMAX | chip | network

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