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Agere moves up a gear; lower power, cheaper WiFi components

Wifi has been amazingly popular; but there are still problems getting wireless components into the smallest, cheapest devices. Agere has moved its technology up a gear.

First, it revealed its first Orinoco brand 50 megabit wireless LAN products, based on the 802.11a standard. But it also announced that it is now "in volume production" of a new generation WiFi chips, at the Networld + Interop trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The 802.11a announcement was brief: the press release "announced the availability of an 802.11a, 5 GHz radio and antenna kit for the award-winning Orinoco AP-2000 dual-radio wireless network access point." These new kits, said Agere, "enable an IT manager to easily add the additional wireless speed, bandwidth and channels provided by 802.11a technologies operating in the 5 GHz frequency range to an AP-2000 wireless access point.

It also announced fifteen customers who have already committed to using one or more of these new products- including Askey, Avaya, Compaq, D-Link, Hewlett-Packard and Samsung.

The family of five new products, which can be implemented in both the end-user device (PC, personal digital assistants, etc) and the access point ends of a wireless LAN, is based on Agere's own highly integrated chipset solution.

Agere believes that reduced price components are necessary to take WiFi into "the next stage of market acceptance. Having already gained broad acceptance in the enterprise market, wireless LANs are starting to move into home and SOHO (small office/home office) computing networks, where they can enable shared broadband Internet access," the company's publicity officials said at the Vegas show. In the next several years Agere expects the market "to develop further into home entertainment, where it will enable audio and video streaming and gaming throughout the house."

Comment: It faces several rivals, of course. The IEEE standard behind WiFi is limited to 11 megabits per second. The biggest opportunity in the home, for wireless, is in video; making sure that incoming cable or satellite channels are distributed around the home without complex (and expensive) wiring. But 11 megabits won't easily cope with even current video - and when the market goes to high-definition TV, then 11 megabits isn't even half the bandwidth needed.

The next generation of WiFi, WiFi5, is based on 802.11a standards; it runs at 50 megabits per second (maximum, of course) which would adequately carry video. But it's not clear that it's going to be suitable for home use.

Its biggest problem will be range. In an office, access point transmitters will be placed wherever they are needed; and there will be wired Ethernet available to bring the data to them - and power, too.

But in the home, nobody is going to want to spend money on more than one access point. And more than one will be needed; nobody now expects an upstairs 11a device to be able to penetrate downstairs; or vice versa. Even the far more transmissive 11b standard has trouble with travelling through more than a simple wooden floor; 11a will be attenuated. And if it comes to concrete and reinforced concrete floors, it simply won't be able to reach a receiver on another level. That would mean you'd have to have an AP for every floor; doubling, or even trebling the cost; and if you wanted outside access in the garden, another one.

So the possibility of 802.11g standards, using the same frequency as WiFi (better penetration) but providing the 50 megabit speeds of 802.11a, is exciting. But that's not going to be available, even for office buyers, till next year at the earliest; the prospect of low-cost 11g components isn't close, at all.

Readers wanting more data can contact Debra Bracher, Agere Systems' enquiry centre, Marketpoint Europe, Ltd. Unit 6, The Western Centre, Western Road, Bracknell, Berkshire RG12 1RW, UK.