Intel considers possible LTE + WiMAX tie-up

The first came from Sean Maloney, Intel's always outspoken head of sales and marketing, who has been WiMAX' greatest cheerleader. With the WiMAX/Wi-Fi "Centrino 2" chipset about to debut, Maloney repeated his usual mantras about WiMAX and powerful new processors bringing the true mobile internet to life at last. However, he deviated from his usual theme that WiMAX would be the lead network in this trend - because of its headstart on LTE and its position in notebooks, traditionally the first platform for new connections. Instead, he echoed the sentiments of Vodafone and other operators, that the industry should unify its OFDMA/IP/MIMO efforts, which will evolve one day into 4G, and bring Mobile WiMAX within the 3GPP LTE standards family (we believe that, should this happen, there will still be a separate standards activity geared to fixed/nomadic WiMAX and emerging market models). Vodafone's outgoing CEO Arun Sarin was the first publicly to call for WiMAX to be harmonized with LTE, perhaps by being adopted as the TDD portion of the standard (something that could be blocked by Ericsson and China, which are cooperating on their own TDD LTE specifications, which do not use OFDMA in the uplink, among other differences, and are largely based on Chinese developments). As well as these parties, Intel has also been perceived as a political block to harmonization, despite periodic talks between the WiMAX Forum and 3GPP, because submerging 802.16e into the larger effort could dilute its influence. However, Maloney knows that, with LTE gaining momentum, partly on the back of disappointment with 802.16e wave two certification's progress, WiMAX' best hope of success among the established mobile and converged operators may well lie with closer ties with LTE.

"In our view they ought to be harmonized," Maloney told the BBC during an interview. The technologies are "broadly similar ... about 80 percent similar. The main difference is that WiMAX is a couple of years ahead," he added, clearly making the case for 802.l6e to take a major role in LTE, but admitting that operators would be "confused" by having two similar platforms, and claiming Intel was "actively looking at harmonization".

Of course, in the end all Intel's politicking and financial investments must lead to chip sales, and it has to be sufficiently agile to change track in pursuit of sales. It has dumped standards before that it had previously supported avidly - Bluetooth comes to mind - and it is even showing signs of wavering in its single-minded backing for WiMedia as the personal area networking standard of choice (see separate item). Before it embraces LTE, it will need to be confident it can play in that market in terms of chip sales, and here it will come up against its traditional problem, its shortage of experience, track record, channels and customers in cellular chips. With Qualcomm storming into Intel's notebook heartland with the 3G Gobi, the larger company is on the defensive and keen to convince the market that, whichever way mobile standards go, it can create a strong revenue stream from them.

Maloney stressed that the Wi-Fi/WiMAX Centrino 2 could be adapted for LTE, though he stressed this was not on the agenda yet but "would certainly be a nice long term goal". More immediately, Intel is repeatedly making the case that its Atom mobile internet device chip will provide it with a genuine route into the mainstream mobile market - out of which it bowed out when it sold its XScale mobile processor unit to Marvell, and with that, its remaining ARM-based activities, leaving it with the challenge of making x86 a dominant architecture in the mobile world as well as the PC. Intel CEO Paul Otellini, as well as predicting sales of 10 million WiMAX devices by the end of 2008 (and "hundreds of millions" by the next decade), told the London Financial Times that, with mobile devices running PC-like applications, the time was right for Intel's smartphone comeback. "If you accept that the value proposition of the high end of the mobile phone market is full internet access that happens to have voice, my view is that it's easier to add voice to a small computer than vice versa," he said in the interview.

The low power MID chips, Atom, will see a mobile version, codenamed Pineview, in late 2009, which will represent Intel's real challenge to TI and Qualcomm and is likely to run 3G and/or LTE standards. While it remains to be seen whether Pineview will fare better than XScale in the cellular heartlands - and whether Centrino 2 can fend off Gobi in the notebook in the meantime - the presence of the mobile Atom on the roadmap makes one clear statement. Intel has to succeed in the mobile internet devices market, and it is already adapting its hard line position on WiMAX to prepare for the eventuality that WiMAX may not have a dominant role in that world.