SAN FRANCISCO — Intel is advancing its wireless
strategy, thanks to an investment partnership with cellular pioneer
Craig
McCaw’s Clearwire.
The chipmaking giant said it will partner with Clearwire, a Kirkland, Wash.-based
wireless broadband services company, to advance the WiMAX
standard (broadly known as 802.16a) and to support the upcoming IEEE
802.16e version. The metro area technology is being touted as a wireless
alternative for last-mile broadband
connection for businesses and homes.
Clearwire’s idea is simple: A tower transmits radio signals from a
base site to a small, wireless modem, the size of a paperback book,
which easily connects a user’s computer to the Internet. Customers can
receive access with minimal setup or support.
McCaw is the founder of one of the country’s first cellular networks,
which he
later sold to AT&T for $11.5 billion, and a current investor in Nextel. He
bought into a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) broadband plug-and-play
hardware company last summer, called NextNet.
In March, his investment company, Eagle River, bought Clearwire
Holding Company, which has spectrum rights in a number of markets around
the country.
Sean Maloney, Intel executive vice president, said the company will
spend an undisclosed amount of its $150 million wireless Intel Capital
fund to foster the development and strategically place its
next-generation Intel chips in devices made by Clearwire’s NextNet
Wireless subsidiary.
“We are [heading] toward merging into that standard where lots of
devices are produced,” Maloney said during a press conference at the
CTIA Wireless show here. “The difference between WiMAX and Wi-Fi is that
the WiMAX community so far has been a healthy ecosystem.”
McCaw said Intel’s investment and its development work with Clearwire
since
last summer will help him spin off NextNet as a separate company as the
WiMAX deployments ramp up.
“We know the cellular market very well and how 3G works,” McCaw said.
“Our partnership will show a definite cost advantage, since this is
designed from the bottom up.”
But beyond their altruistic build-out of wireless IP in rural areas,
analysts like Gerry Purdy, a principal analyst with MobileTrax, argue that
Intel and Clearwire are looking to prevent what happened in the wired
world from happening in the wireless one.
“Intel and McCaw’s company are not competing with the larger VoIP
players … yet,” Purdy told internetnews.com. “But what you have is
the two companies
focusing on the infrastructure first and then working into the various
contracts in metro areas.”
Purdy’s suggestion is the VoIP or Internet telephony
potential threat of Voice over Wireless IP. The wireline industry has
been slowly losing market share to VoIP in the last few quarters, as customers
begin seeing the cost benefits. Intel and Clearwire are obviously
aware of that power.
Intel’s aspirations for WiMAX are well documented. The company envisions
WiMAX for rural areas and developing nations. It has said it is
producing
WiMAX-enabled silicon with a range of up to 30 miles and the ability to
transfer data,
voice and video at speeds of up
to 70 Mbps. The technology, codenamed “Rosedale,” is based on the IEEE
802.16-2004 standard (previously known as IEEE 802.16REVd). The
technology, expected next year, is Intel’s first “system-on-a-chip” for
WiMAX.
Now, using NextNet technology based on Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiplexing, Intel and McCaw are gearing up for a wider
launch.
NextNet’s Expedience system is spreading around Asia, Africa, North
America, Latin America and Mexico. NextNet is the exclusive NLOS
plug-and-play system supplier for
MVS Comunicaciones, Mexico’s largest MMDS carrier, with licensed
spectrum covering 67 million potential subscribers. NextNet is also the
exclusive NLOS plug-and-play system supplier for the Canadian joint
venture of Inukshuk, Allstream, and NR Communications, which holds
licensed spectrum covering 30 million Canadians.
In the United States, NextNet is available in Arizona, Florida,
Iowa,
Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina and Ohio.
