Intel Scratches WiFi"> Intel Scratches WiFi

“We’ve been talking to our OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) a lot about this, and right now, we’re not planning to productize (Wireless Connect) in the 91x and 925 platforms this year,” said Bill Leszinske, director of Intel’s Digital Home initiative. “The OEMs came back to us and said, ‘We don’t think we really need this right now.’ So we decided to step back.”

The move, which gives a nod to the prolific nature of Wi-Fi access-point competitors such as Linksys and NetGear, also shows a shift in Intel’s digital home strategy. Instead of aiming to provide all of the nuts and bolts of the digital home–where Intel and PC makers envision that a wide range of devices will share multimedia files and Internet access provided by a PC–Intel will stick to efforts such as designing new kinds of PCs–its Entertainment PCs, for example–and to driving digital home standards through efforts such as the Digital Living Network Alliance to help foster the sharing of content between PCs, televisions and other devices. Devices that use DLNA standards will begin appearing soon, Leszinske said.

Gee… And here I sit with ASUS A8V and K8V motherboards (for AMD processors) with WiFi capability thanks to a VIA chipset. Did VIA make a mistake in getting to market first?