Intel plans to replicate wi-fi success with wimax adoption

Intel WiMAX director for Thailand, Vietnam and Philippines, Kavin Lim said the company has a three-phase WiMAX road map up to 2011.

The first phase will include the introduction of Mobile WiMAX Rel 1.0 (802.16e) with speeds of 60 megabits per seconds and higher.

Then, it plans to launch the next release of WiMAX technology - Mobile WiMAX Rel 1.5 (802.16e Rev2) - starting next year to 2010. The throughput of the network is expected to be 125 Mbps. The company will then release Mobile WiMAX Rel 2.0 (802.16m) to the market in 2010 and 2011. The connection speed is expected to be 300 Mbps and higher.

Intel has already developed and launched its WiMAX products and designs to the market to encourage wider WiMAX adoption.

Its combo modules for WiMAX and WiFi, code-named "Echo Peak", have been adopted by several laptop manufacturers, such as Toshiba, Acer, Lenovo and Asus and were launched in the American market last week.

"The first combo modules of WiMAX and WiFI is in the Centrino 2 available only in the US market for now," Lim said.

Another module is the WiMAX-embedded chipset for consumer electronics and mobile devices, including Intel's Mobile Internet Device. The code name is "Baxter Peak" and is in the design phase.

"Intel also provides a reference design for being use as WiMAX add-on cards, code named 'Dana Point' for original design manufacturers, such as ZTE and Huawei and ZyXel," Lim said.

"WiMAX technology is crafting a huge market for business use. It is expected that WiMAX will become a US$10-billion [Bt340 billion] market for new users on consumer-electronics and mobile devices. WiMAX will drive new embedded mobile-Internet business models and vertical applications," Lim said.

Intel aims to drive the adoption of WiMAX technology similar to the way it propagated WiFi. Lim said that only three years after it launched the Centrino platform, which is a WiFi-embedded chipset, the penetration rate of laptops embedded with WiFi was about 90 per cent of the total laptops across the world. And now, almost all laptops in the world are WiFi-embedded.

"WiMAX will change the PC ecosystem once again. Today, WiFi is everywhere but tomorrow it will be a combination of WiFi and WiMAX," Lim said.

But for WiMAX, the drivers are different. He said the individual corporate user can deploy a WiFi network himself, which helped adoption. However, WiMAX adoption will depend on the operator's investment plan as well as the government's frequency and license allocation.

Lim said emerging economies in Southeast Asia should be encouraged to adopt WiMAX with the 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz spectrum band.

Only Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia have reached the trial stage of WiMAX. Many other countries in the region, such as Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Cambodia, have launched the commercial version of WiMAX this year.