Speaking at WiMAX World last week, Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group, said Motorola will integrate Intel’s WiMAX Connection 2250 into their CPEi 200 Series of WiMAX clients.
Intel’s Mobile WiMAX chip, formerly called Rosedale 2, is the first with dual mode support, bridging the worlds of fixed and mobile WiMAX. Optimized for cost-effective Mobile WiMAX (or fixed) deployments, Intel says Motorola, Alcatel, Navini, Proxim, Siemens and SR Telecom, among others, have announced they will incorporate the new Intel chip into their product lines.
Sprint plans 100,000 WiMax points of presence by the end of 2008. It will be overlayed on the company’s existing CDMA EV-DO 1x cellular net, says Barry West, Sprint’s CTO. Intel’s cards will combine both 802.11 wireless LAN and 802.16e mobile WiMax chips. “These combined chipsets will be common,” he says.
Sprint owns 2.5GHz spectrum in 85 percent of the top 100 U.S. markets, according to Sprint CEO Gary Forsee. Its penetration will be market-driven , first focusing on the top 100 US markets, then expanding outward to areas that offer the most return on investment.
Maloney also said it has begun a mobile WiMAX trial in Portland, Oregon in collaboration with Clearwire and Motorola. The trial is expected to run through 2007. Clearwire currently offers “pre-WiMAX” in 31 markets.
Intel’s Mobile WiMAX chip (pdf), in 802.16e-2005 Mode, features:
- OFDMA 512/1024 PHY mode with support for channel bandwidths up to 10 MHz
- Support for TDD and H/FDD duplexing modes
- PUSC with all subchannels and dedicated pilots, FUSC, AMC 2×3 for AAS Beam Forming support
- Concatenated Reed-Solomon and Convolutional Encoding Forward Error Correction
- Adaptive modulation (BPSK, QPSK, QAM16, QAM64)
- Enhanced link budget support
- 2-channel matrix A MIMO support
- Uplink/Downlink sub-channelization
- SNR, RSSI channel quality measurements
- Switched diversity
- ARQ, HARQ
- AAS/Beam Forming
In other news, Intel showed off two notebooks based on its low-cost reference design on Tuesday at its Developer Forum in Taipei. The PCs are aimed at poor countries as part of a five-year, US$1 billion global program meant to ensure nobody is left behind in the digital age.
The latest notebook reference design is aimed at Taiwan, which is an emerging but by no means poor economy. The device is orange, comes with a shoulder strap built on and is meant for school-age children. The ultraportable will house a 900MHz Intel Celeron M processor, 7-inch 800 x 480 LCD, 256MB of DDR2 RAM, and 1GB of flash memory instead of a hard drive.
“How do you connect the next billion people to the Internet? Not with fiber, not with wires—it’s going to be WiMax,” said John Antone, Intel’s sales and marketing manager for Asia, during a news briefing at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei.
The Intel reference design includes wireless Internet functions that can be tweaked for each market by an assortment of companies. Intel executives would not say which companies are making the low-cost laptops, but indicated it was more than just one. Intel’s reference design should ensure the price is below $400, perhaps closer to $200.
Intel’s low-cost laptops, dubbed “Classmate PCs,” will be sold by vendors in developing nations starting in the first quarter of 2007. So far, 3.6 million teachers have received IT training through Intel’s World Ahead Program, with 500,000 slated to be trained by the end of this year, according to Tom Kilroy, general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group.
The Intel initiative competes with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, led by Nicholas Negroponte. That project has developed a prototype for around $130 for use by students in developing countries. The laptop is being manufactured by Taiwan’s Quanta Computer, the world’s largest contract notebook PC maker.
