Intel - Chip Chat

Intel, at heart, is a technology company. Its global team is made up of experts in a range of fields and today we meet Margaret LaBrecque, Global Industry Marketing Manager, who shares her views on the evolution of the mobile broadband market and its implications for Intel.

When Intel first got involved with mobile broadband in the early 2000s, it was not a well-known phrase. Subsequently, however, we watched WiFi hot spots springing up around the world as a result of our commitment to and investment in the technology. Broadband was becoming more pervasive, but there were still gaps to fill. 3G was still in its infancy, and over the next several years would become more broadly deployed but with some less-than-ideal characteristics such as high costs and limited compatible devices and applications.

We knew we could do better. WiFi was proving to be the greatest thing since Ethernet to hit local area networks, so why couldn’t we take a similar model and apply it to the wide area network? Enter WiMAX.

Fast forward to 2009 and today there are more than 450 WiMAX deployments in over 135 countries across the globe. Sixteen manufacturers have embedded or committed to embedding WiMAX in their laptop product lines and more than 50 models are already available. All this means that WiMAX is the only solution available today and for the near future that’s delivering price-leading embedded module cost, unparalleled speed, radically better latency (critical for online games) and unbridled mobile access to the greatest invention of the information age – the Internet.

For example, Intel’s first- generation embedded WiFi/WiMAX products are available at only a moderate price premium over our WiFi only modules.

So why is this important to Intel? During the 1990s, broadband access to Internet became the number one driver of PC demand. Over the coming decade, mobile broadband is expected to be the primary driver of mobile computing and communication device demand. So, it is mission critical to Intel to have affordable, high speed broadband in all of its forms.

WiMAX is not the only growing technology in this space however. LTE and WiMAX are fundamentally similar in terms of both radio technologies and core network, meaning they can be expected to deliver similar performance. Both can act as overlays to existing 2G and 3G networks, as we’ve seen with GSM and 3G operators deploying WiMAX today. Both require new client devices, new (and wide) swaths of spectrum, and new base station equipment.

There are two big differences between the two technologies. Firstly, WiMAX has a significant head start, with deployment already underway and hundreds of devices available. Second is the nature of the industry. Unlike the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) ecosystem where a small number of companies own the majority of the intellectual property , patent ownership is far more diversified in the WiMAX ecosystem. The lower barriers to entry welcome new players which are essential to driving competition and innovation and keeping device costs low. Let’s face it – if WiMAX hadn’t come along, it’s highly probable that the LTE standard would have stayed on its original schedule and not been available before 2012 or beyond. The mere existence of the WiMAX ecosystem has already disrupted the original schedule to deliver true mobile broadband service to data-hungry consumers.

Spectrum is also an important differentiator. Today WiMAX has established economies of scale in three primary bands – the 2.3, 2.5 and 3.5 GHz bands – where there are wide swaths of spectrum available to deploy true mobile broadband networks.

The spectrum situation for LTE is less clear. Outside the US, it will be quite some time before the “digital dividend” (700 MHz) spectrum is available. In Europe, auctions of the 2.5 GHz – a target band for LTE – have for the most part been delayed and it’s expected that most operators will not deploy LTE before 2012.

Finally, let’s look at LTE timeframes: In the cellular space, it typically takes over three years to go from standards completion to shipping. The LTE standard was completed in March of 2009 and is still undergoing major changes. Also, LTE silicon for handsets is not expected before mid 2010, which would push availability of devices into 2011.

Considering all this, we’ve heard some mobile operators say that they will continue to “evolve” their 3G networks and wait until 2011 or 2012 to deploy LTE. Current mobile data traffic forecasts would indicate that the incremental 20-40 percent increases in capacity delivered by these “evolutions” won’t have a chance of keeping up. What’s needed is a revolution, not an evolution.

Looking to the future, we’re not saying that LTE won’t eventually be successful - if the success of WiMAX today is any indicator, it’s likely it will be. We expect both solutions to co-exist in the market and believe that consumers will be the primary beneficiaries of these two vibrant ecosystems pushing the mobile broadband envelope. And Intel won’t complain about having more sources of broadband data for its platforms either.