Andy pointed me to this story over at UnStrung. Qualcomm which has traditionally shunned the whole WiFI thing has joined the TGn Sync group working on developing the new 108-Mbit/s high-speed WiFi standard, 802.11n. Paul Jacobs, the new big Q in a conference call said, “The work we’re doing will be increasingly important to allow phones to share multimedia content with other consumer devices.” I think it is clear, the company wants to re-distribute the content being streamed/downloaded to the handset to be shared in a home environment. How about video clips on the handset being played back on Plasma screen. Or could it be that, Qualcomm wants to turn the “handset into a set-top box.” We will have to wait till end of 2005 to find out what really happens, as new 802.11n products come to market.
I think Andy’s point is nonsense.
QCOM has been playing with WiFi chipset support for years. Until now, its customers, ie carriers, have shunned WiFi, so the buzz was nil.
Now MediaFlo is important, because it puts QCOM in the business of wholesaling wireless multimedia, thus they can have more say/control over handsets, etc.
So QCOM can use MediaFlo + little MVNO’s to shame the big slow moving carriers into more dependence.
What QCOM is about, 1) is knocking off (locking out?) its W-CDMA competitors, and 2) selling high priced==high royalty devices.
PS. The real news on Unstrung is that Flarion finally has signed a carrier, owned by T-Mobile no less.
thanks for your insight charlie. by the way talking to folks over at flarion tomorrow. should be a fun chat. cheers
I just recently attended a lecture by a Computer Science guy who works for Lucent. He was working on creating ad hoc wireless networks that could share content locally. In other words, if at all possible try and avoid going out over the 3G network. So everybody sitting at Starbucks using their 3G connection could theoretically be delivering content to other folks around them and vice versa. He was using a few AI principles like Nash equilibrium and some other game theory stuff to figure out when a computer should store, retrieve or serve content locally. It was pretty neat.
He said they were doing this because the tax on 3g networks from high bandwidth activity was more than what they expected the system to handle. Perhaps this is why QCOM is so interested in WiFi all of the sudden?
Om,
Ask Ronny about the state of Asian F-OFDM handsets?
Man, it would be really awesome to see T-Mobile USA go with Flarion. Then our lame ass market would get some heat.
Heck EV-DO is nearly 6 years old!!! That’s four iterations of Moore’s law for you SV types.
Finally, ask Flarion why they are so shy about the growing trend of municiple networks? They are giving lots of free yardage to the “wireless” gurus at Intel. vbg.
I promise this is the last soc comment. At a party somebody was talking about pitching the idea of bundling wireless on the property tax bill. Something like add $20-$50/yr to your average bill of >$1000. This way you get scale off the bat, and you save on billing and collecting.
Like I said, Flarion is giving Intel lots of “free” room.