February - 2004 issue > Feature: Silicon Horizon

By Karthik Sundaram

"You are seeing the perfect storm in the wireless,” says the wireless evangelist and managing director of Intel Capital, Sriram Viswanathan. “The stars came aligned three years ago. Unlicensed spectrum led the Wi-Fi growth in the home. Consumers—who had tasted the wireless at home—came to the office wanting the same. The IT managers did the natural thing—resist the trend.” The serious challenges in implementing a wireless enterprise system foretold the excitement in the opportunities—security, management and so on. Along came Intel and put this on to a platform, and the rest is history, says Viswanathan.

“Security is a big thing. This is like plumbing where there is no one single solution. You have to be patching leaks as they crop up and at times even use Draino,” Viswanathan draws an analogy. Layer the large scale security needs of the state and country, and this space is going to be full of opportunities for the entrepreneur, he says. “And look outside the enterprise. You see another big playing ground.” Wi-Fi applications availability at wirespeed outside the physical enterprise is going to be a huge market. Software that will glue all this together—LAN/WAN conversions, provisioning, network management and selection, roaming and so on are exciting areas now, comments the Intel investor.

On top of these two is layered the manageability issue—a unified application framework. Software and hardware that provide OSS capabilities is growing and will see increasing investments, says Viswanathan. Beyond this, extending the LAN/WAN convergence to the metro area and into the carrier world is where Intel is focusing now. WiMAX is now attracting serious attention from the carrier class, says Viswanathan.

Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Communications Group Sean Maloney recently said the company’s vision includes a three-stage deployment of WiMAX that would begin with fixed outdoor antenna installations to bring wireless to emerging markets and speed the installation of broadband services without the need to lay wire or cable.
“The technology will then rapidly progress to indoor antenna installations, broadening its appeal to carriers seeking simplified installation at user sites,” Maloney said. “Finally, in the third phase, WiMAX-Certified hardware will be available in portable solutions for users who want to roam within or between service areas.” As with Centrino, Intel hopes to encourage startups to provide innovations that would enable the WiMAX proliferation. “Centrino was a great excercise,” says Viswanathan, “perhaps the only product to return investments in 14 months.”
“The reality is that many telcos suffered a huge disappointment since the Internet crash when they were left with tens of thousands of unused wires,” says Peter Kastner, research vice president with the Aberdeen Group, Inc., in Boston. “After all, WiMAX is just another carrier backhaul which needs to be monetized, and how anybody makes money with more bandwidth is a fair question.”

If you have more query about magazine please send mail to

May 12	April 12	March 12	Feb 12