News

Broadcom bypasses its customers to get enterprises hooked on latest WiFi

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 23 April 2008

A new range of "end to end solutions" for business WiFi has been announced by Broadcom. The announcement means that the chip designer is edging closer to competition with its customers.

At this point, the new WiFi solutions are reference designs, aimed at existing Broadcom customers, and there's nothing in the announcement to suggest that the California company plans to create a factory producing hardware on a large scale.

However, the slow corporate takeup of the newest WiFi technology, 802.11n has led to a fear in the market that the standard will get fragmented. Chips from different semiconductor producers, labelled as 802.11n, may (or may not) work correctly with each other, as the market isn't waiting for the IEEE to finalise the standard.

By producing a complete reference design which addresses all the problems that corporate customers face in upgrading, Broadcom clearly hopes to get its chips into business premises faster than rivals can.

Today's announcement covers much more than just the 802.11n chips. Broadcom has added switching technology and even power supply solutions:

"Broadcom’s BCM4342 Wi-Fi solution is also the first to successfully address power consumption issues that have slowed business adoption of 802.11n to date. Although dual-band 802.11n access points offer greater bandwidth and capacity than previous products, simultaneous operation of both radios has traditionally exceeded the power limits of the Power over Ethernet (PoE) equipment used in nearly all large networks. This forced IT managers to use two PoE ports for each access point, or upgrade their entire network to support the new PoE+ standard (IEEE 802.3at)."

It also ties this technology to other Broadcom designs: "By marrying the industry’s leading WLAN solutions with proven switch hardware and software, Broadcom is well-positioned to pursue the $2.3 billion enterprise wireless market with an end-to-end solution."

This means that systems designers who like to pick and choose components from several silicon sources, will be under pressure to use an all-Broadcom solution. This means that systems designers who like to pick and choose components from several silicon sources, will be under pressure to use an all-Broadcom solution.

The full text of Broadcom's announcement is in our PR section today.