To the surprise of few, Intel has formally announced its IEEE 802.16 (WiMax) wireless chip project. Significantly, they will be supporting the 802.16a flavor, which is designed to run below 10GHz, specifically including unlicensed bands. Intel is choosing the low cost option, both for silicon fabrication and deployment in service. As has been noted here before, WiMax is not a competitor to the 802.11 (WiFi) wireless LAN standards. Instead, it is suited for backhauling hotspot, residential, and small business data traffic, and includes QoS options that might also enable VoIP and modest video traffic. Schedule is not specified, but RHIT sampling near the end of year. Support for some of the options introduced near the end of the 802.16a standardization process, such as meshing, is also unclear.

Along with this announcement, BWA systems OEM Alvarionannounced that they will build a product line around the Intel chips. Again, no surprise, as it has been widely rumored that Alvarion had terminated its internal OFDM silicon project. This makes business sense for Alvarion: they have long established sales channels and carrier relationships, and sufficient balance sheet to overcome the sales hiccup that will undoubtedly result as customers wait for the new standards-based products to arrive. On the other hand, this hiatus will hit a number of startups in the category hard, and the Intel announcement may be in part intended to preempt a few who are rumored to be trying to beat them to market with WiMax silicon.
9:24:43 AM