If anyone had underestimated the importance of wireless going into 2003, the hysteria preceding the 3GSM conference in February and the CTIA show later this month has been an awakening. Intel Capital kicked off the season in January with a raving endorsement of the now-ratified IEEE 802.16 broadband wireless standard, calling it the next big thing after Wi-Fi (802.11).
That rally was followed by a veritable snowstorm of wireless chip announcements. Texas Instruments Inc. made a double play, targeting handhelds and 3G UMTS infrastructure. TI announced a "tweaked out" Omap applications-processor lineup the same week that STMicroelectronics made its own apps-processor gambit.
By now, you'll have read ad nauseum about Intel's PXA800 (Manitoba) "wireless Internet on a chip," which is anything but, as well as Analog Devices Inc.'s expansive partnerships with NeoMagic (again, for mobile apps processors) and Intel for its MSA DSP and OthelloOne direct-conversion radio. The latter two will exercise ADI's RF and mixed-signal expertise for GSM, GPRS and EDGE. Motorola, Avaya and Proxim, not to be left out, have laid their cards on the table with a merged cellular/wireless LAN solution for voice.
As for WLANs themselves, the new entrants just keep coming. Optical and core specialist Juniper Networks made a lunge, joining startups like Vivato and Aruba Wireless. Chantry Networks is poking up its Wi-Fi head, and FHP Wireless raised $8.3 million in financing for its Wi-Fi infrastructure. Who said money was scarce?
The real kicker came in mid-February when the IEEE 802.15 Working Group revealed that it had received 29 proposals for the 802.15.3a Task Group's short-range, high-speed wireless PHY. It had been expecting eight or nine.
All this activity is coming at a time when corporate write-offs, due mostly to optical investments gone bad, continue to wreak havoc. Broadcom wrote off $4.5 billion and Qwest $2.2 billion. Philips lost $3.4 billion, although most of that was due to its stake in Vivendi.
So why all the fuss about what is essentially a pretty crummy information medium? Basically, what's being sold is mobility. But almost to the man, the wide-area-network chip announcements have had the same mantra: multimedia processing and low power consumption. That's a veritable oxymoron.
When TI bragged about doubling the talk and standby times for 3G handsets, I wasn't too excited. Don't get me wrong: TI made great breakthroughs in power management and integration. But in the real world, 110 hours' standby time and 2 hours' talk time on a 3G phone that is theoretically also going to be used for data access and multimedia streaming don't really cut it.
I say "theoretically" because the killer application remains voice. If "sticky" data applications that consumers can't do without don't start appearing soon to generate revenues from all this wireless data investment, a lot of corporate heads are going to roll over the coming year to 18 months. In a comms industry running blind, wireless is the one-eyed king. But if that eye closes...
Patrick Mannion
pmannion@cmp.com
