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Intel fires up the WiMAX juggernaut engine with "Rosedale" silicon - all aboard!

But where is this going? The launch of the WiMAX silicon yesterday has hit every headline, and mostly, the news writers have been impressed. And so they should be! - it's a huge publicity launch. Is it what it seems, though?

This site has taken a uniformly sceptical approach to the WiMAX phenomenon, suggesting that "Intel is up to something" - a viewpoint which seems to be gaining currency.

Not all comments have been as uncritical as those in  mainstream newspapers seem to have been, pretty much simply echoing what Intel  put into its magnum opus announcement

Intel lined up supporting quotes from 13 carriers, starting with Altitude Telecom, BT, Brasil Telecom, and ETB, right down to Ukranian High Technologies (UHT); and it marshalled praise from ten equipment makers, beginning with Airspan Networks and ending with Zimax - and not content with that, trotted out "other ecosystem players" from Gemtek to the Wireless Communications Association.

Typical of the gushing enthusiasm: "Eric Mantion, an analyst at high-tech market research firm In-Stat, said mobile phones using WiMax networks could one day provide competition for cell phones, much as satellite television service offers an alternative to cable TV" - from Washington Post, which even went on to quote the WiMAX Forum, as if it were not a puppet of Intel.

There are also "authoritative" comments from sites which ought to be better informed:  Information Week offered this, entirely mistaken analysis: "In the wireless world, faster is better. So is greater range..." - when in fact, the entire method and purpose of wireless development in the last 30 years has been to make range smaller, and the number of users supported greater.

But not everybody has been quite that clueless. Ars Technica quoted Verizon on the subject of urban wireless: "That could be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard" - Ivan Seidenberg, CEO - while columnist Robert Cringeley suggested that wireless users, not carriers, might build networks faster than any competitor.

The piece also pointed out that at $45 a chip, the WiMAX solution is not going to be popular because of its price tag.