IDF 2007: Q&A: The state of WiMAX

WiMAX will be an option on Menlow UMPC systems and Montevina Centrino notebooks next year and Intel is investing with KDDI in a bid to roll out WiMAX in Japan. IT PRO asked Sriram Viswanathan, the general manager of the WiMAX programme office at Intel - who's also the managing director of Intel Capital - what progress Intel has made on the prediction that 2008 will be the year of WiMAX.

By Mary Branscombe in San Francisco, 21 Sep 2007 at 15:13

gallery

It's going to be a long time if ever before a camera has a cellular chip in it but it's reasonable to expect a Wi-Fi or WiMAX chip in a camera. Sprint, for example, is working with Google on a service offering for 4G WiMAX. If Samsung comes up with a WiMAX camera Sprint could offer a service for that Samsung camera to take pictures and upload them to [Google's] Picasa software, for a specific price.

What difference is building in WiMAX going to make to a notebook? Will you get the same battery life as Wi-Fi? Is there a reason not to build WiMAX into a Montevina notebook?

Echo Beach is literally expected to go into the same slot and go into the same power envelope in the system as Wi-Fi. From a performance standpoint at the platform level it's going to be the same form factor, the same power budget and with, hopefully, no degradation in battery life. Obviously there'll be a difference in price.

What's the biggest problem we need to solve to make WiMAX a real solution? Is it technology/business models or regulation?

It won't be real until - and unless - the PC original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) take this technology and make it available on the platforms. By the time we get closer to launch significantly more vendors will be supporting WiMAX.