Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 27 June 2007 10:34
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Which makes the suggestions that Linksys might be entering this market very interesting, because it would certainly push down prices. Linksys is a Cisco subsidiary and the networking giant never enters a market to be a bit player: its goal is to be number one or number two, and the home/SOHO market is nothing if not price sensitive. Even before the acquisition, in 2003, Linksys was a market leader in the home/SOHO networking space.
US networking website, Unstrung Insider, reported in May that "Cisco is now looking at the prospects of several of its networking divisions introducing WiMax "products....reversing a sometimes combative stance on the emerging wireless technology from the company." It quoted industry sources saying: "The wireless, cable, and Linksys groups are all looking at WiMax."
Unstrung Insider renewed its speculation this week when Sprint (which is investing billions of dollars rolling out mobile WiMAX) CTO, Barry West told it that a "major, major routing company" was working on a home router product using WiMax wireless broadband technology.
If he's talking about Linksys, which seems highly likely, then you can bet your boots this stuff will be cheap. But note that we are talking 'mobile' WiMAX here, the technology that Sprint plans to rollout, which will not help Opel much as its plan, so far anyway, is to use fixed WiMAX.
The general consensus is that mobile WiMAX will be the dominant flavour and almost all the comparisons made with HSPA are for mobile WiMAX.
So why is Opel proposing to use fixed WiMAX? Number one, mobile WiMAX is not available for the 5.8GHz shared spectrum band which is all it can be certain of accessing today. Number 2, as the first commercial mobile WiMAX base stations are not due to hit the market until Q4 this year and CPE sometime next year, Opel might well be hard pressed t meet its network completion date of mid 2009 using mobile WiMAX.
