Gossip

Step forward the Wireless Doomsayer!

In defiance of "doomsayers" - apparently - Intersil and Silicon Wave have managed to squeeze two wireless standards into the same card.

Sniffer's packet-tracing exercises were rewarded by the interception of the following sequence this week: "Wireless standards 802.11b and Bluetooth can interfere with each other, but a new card from Intersil and Silicon Wave claims to iron out their differences."

The article, by Rupert Goodwins (a former colleague of Sniffer's boss, Guy Kewney) says: "In defiance of doomsayers who predicted that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi could never coexist, chip companies Intersil and Silicon Wave have announced one board that does both wireless standards at the same time.

We'll give Rupert the plug for this - but who, exactly, are the doom-sayers?

Actually, it was Rupert, who was famously the first technical writer to point out that both WiFi and Bluetooth used the same frequencies, but had a different spread spectrum management system, and that there could be real problems.

Full story from Silicon Wave itself where the press release points out that this is a technology demonstration - a "reference design" shown by Intersil and Silicon Wave as a mini-PCI design at Networld + Interop last week.

It will be built into notebook PCs by PC builders when it ships; you can't buy one and plug it into the slot ...