May 6th, 2005
Rant of the Week: Intel Re-Writes History On WiFi
The picture on your right is a product I actually have used and written about. It comes from a time not long ago when Intel decided to take on Ethernet and offer a home networking solutions it called AnyPoint.
AnyPoint networks could share a dial-up connection (what I considered living definition of “dog slow”) or a blistering fast 1.5Mbps connection that was anything but speedy in most reviews written at the time. All this is fine and good, until you take a gander at recent comments the company has been making about WiMAX and WiFi in general.
In today’s Wall Street Journal for example, Intel’s CEO Craig Barrett predicted that WiMAX would would have an even great impact on its business than WiFi, and and that WiFi thanks to Intel’s Centrino brand was responsible for driving the growth in sales of notebook computers. An earlier WiMAX story said the essentially same thing from another Intel representative- Intel’s Centrino put WiFi on the map and Intel will do the same with WiMAX. Or as the company put it: “Intel’s support for Wi-Fi in its Centrino brand of notebook computer chips made the short-range wireless technology into a global standard popular in cafes, homes, offices and other public spaces.”
Alice’s Rant: NONSENSE. Intel was busy hawking AnyPoint while the world jumped up and embraced WiFi. My first WiFi add in card circa 2001 was from a company called Proxim and I loved it. At my company we raced to install Linksys Wireless 802.11b routers and add-in cards, and when 802.11g came out, we moved to that faster standard and have been happily computing ever since. True my current ThinkPad has a Centrino chip-set and built-in WiFi from Intel, but claiming that it was the reason WiFi succeeded is just downright absurd. Intel was late to the party after backing the wrong horse, and now its re writing history.
Shame on you.
Dave Barnes says:
Another computer company did a lot to promote WiFi. In fact, it was so far out in front with AirPort that most people had no idea how they would use it.
May 6th, 2005 at 10:19 am
David says:
My household used the Intel Anypoint HomePNA adapters for a little while to share out cable internet when we first got it. Then when we upgraded to Windows XP less than a year later there were no drivers for them and they were useless. Nice customer support Intel
May 6th, 2005 at 11:13 am
Jason says:
HA HA - I remember setting up an AnyPoint network in my old office. What a joke! I got average 14.4k speeds when transferring files from computer to computer! The small AnyPoint network, which cost as much as my main server at the time, promptly went right back to CompUSA where it came from. Boo!
P.S. Intel marketing folks must be high on silicon dust. I cringe at the lame-o Centrino commercials on TV that depict people computing wirelessly in the middle of a corn field, or atop a mountain, or on top of a skyscraper - as if!
May 6th, 2005 at 3:04 pm
David says:
I believe there was a class action lawsuit about those commercials. I’m pretty sure why that’s why they stopped running them. Anyway, WiMAX does sound pretty interesting to me from what I’ve heard of it. I don’t think the expanding future of WiFi is an “if” but more of a “who” and “when” question. So far, I haven’t seen anything that looks like it will be competing with WiMAX though.
May 7th, 2005 at 1:42 am
Jim Frost says:
I don’t know anything about AnyPoint, but Intel taking credit for the rise of Wi-Fi is laughable.
If you want to know what kicked off the huge growth of Wi-Fi I’d say it was the Intersil PRISM 802.11 chipset, which formed the core of many of the early affordable wireless cards. But inter-vendor compatibility wasn’t so hot with those cards, and they were limited to 2mbps. The technology that caused the explosion was the PRISM-II which hit the streets in 1999.
While Apple got a lot of press, the Lucent WaveLAN cards and access points, based on the PRISM-II chipset, were what got the notice of businesses. Apple’s products are actually derivative of the Lucent designs. In my mind Apple’s primary contribution, besides raising public awareness, was selling an access point for less than $1000 (it was, as I recall, about $300 — Lucent’s AP-II was about four times that).
For consumers without Apple technology, which was most of us, it would be another two years before access points dropped to affordable price-points. I didn’t wait, and I didn’t buy Apple; my first wireless network was built using $90 Zoom 802.11 cards in 1999 (the WaveLAN cards were still several hundred dollars). Access points were too expensive (even Apple’s base station was three times the cost of my entire wireless network) so my network was ad-hoc, using a Linux router and the very-much-in-its-infancy WLAN software. In order to get the WLAN software to play nice with the Windows boxes I had to fix a packet defragmentation bug; before that fix the Windows boxes would crash the Linux router every time they initiated a bulk data transfer. But once that was fixed the system was rather solid and computing power in my household was no longer confined to the office (for better or for worse, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only).
I was very proud of getting that network up, only to find out that my company was doing a proof-of-concept using WaveLAN 802.11b technology at the time. It went into wide deployment a couple of months later, and within a year the whole company had shifted from desktops to laptops with wireless connections. This had numerous business advantages and totally transformed the nature of meetings.
Intel’s Centrino was very much a latecomer by any definition. The PRISM-II had been on the market for four years by then, and Wi-Fi was broadly supported by consumer brands like Linksys, D-Link, and Belkin. Centrino could be credited as being the technology that standardized built-in Wi-Fi in Intel-based laptops, but that only seems impressive until you realize that Apple was already on its third generation of laptops supporting wireless technology internally by the 2003 introduction of Centrino, and was already deploying 802.11g technology (having introduced Airport Extreme some three months before Centrino hit the streets).
jim
May 7th, 2005 at 2:28 am
Brett Glass says:
It’s ironic that it was the Intersil Prism chipset was indeed the one that kicked off the Wi-Fi revolution, because Intel — at the same time as it is engaging in revisionist history — is refusing to make its Centrino chips work with access points based on the Intersil Prism chips.
That’s right: several years after the incompatibilities were pointed out in the trade press, Intel still has not fixed the incompatibilities between its Centrino line and Wi-Fi access points based on the venerable Intersil Prism chipsets. Millions upon millions of Wi-Fi access points use this chipset, including several by D-Link as well as the venerable Senao CB3+ Deluxe.
We are an ISP, and serve some apartment complexes and coffeehouses that have Wi-Fi hotspots and access points. As we have learned after many tech support calls from frustrated users, if you have a Centrino laptop, you will likely find that you cannot use many Wi-Fi hotspots.
Our users have reported these problems again and again to Intel, as has my wireless ISP. But Intel’s tech support apparently is set up to assume that any and al problems will be the fault of the user; they’re just plain not equipped to receive reports of an actual bug in their product! When we’ve tried to get the issue esclated, we’re told that we should call the manufacturer of the laptop that’s having the problem and have them complain to Intel. But our company doesn’t own any Centrino-based laptops (for this very reason), so this is nothing but a runaround.
As a result, our ISP can only warn users that if they buy a Centrino-based laptop (which we do not recommend that they do), they’ll probably have to keep a separate Wi-Fi adapter (a PCMCIA card or a USB Wi-Fi adapter) handy if they want to be sure to connect. In my opinion, Intel should not be allowed to call its Centrino chips “Wi-Fi” until they fix this frustrating incompatibility.
October 25th, 2008 at 9:08 am