Intel: Wireless Evolution Underway

Amid a revolution of wireless technology that lets today's users enjoy  high-speed data connections in airports and in coffee shops, Intel is positioning itself to reap the rewards.

The company's four big business units certainly include its traditional

Eric Mentzer, the Chief Technology Officer of the Communications Group, recently sat down with Electronic News to discuss the wireless revolution and how Intel plans to be a part of it. The following are excerpts of that interview.

Electronic News:    Intel recently merged its handheld technology group into the Communications Group. How does that help further Intel's goals?

Mentzer: With the head of that unit, Ron Smith, retiring, we decided to merge the two groups. That allows us to look not only across the devices, but also the networks that are going to feed them. The combined business groups now allow us to only look at how to evolve the handheld clients and put new capabilities into them, but also allows us to make sure we are going to have a network that is going to feed the services and the content that make that happen.

Electronic News:    How are communications evolving?

Mentzer:  Probably the two themes that will define the next decade are mobilization and modularization. The next decade will be defined by the era of broadband wireless with high-speed access to information, entertainment and data anywhere. 

And there are a whole bunch of key technologies to deliver this broadband wireless decade. There's WiFi, WiMax, 3g capability and new generation mobile clients that I think will just proliferate. And there's going to be all kinds of different clients -- some voice-centric that will do data and entertainment and some entertainment-centric but they will do voice.

Still you can have the world's best cell phone and unless it has some kind of network to feed it then all it can do is voice calls. That is where I think modularization comes in. That will probably be accelerated by mobilization. Carriers have got to figure out how to get newer services out quickly. You can't just sit there and handcraft these services up on a vertical basis like you used to. The communications infrastructure will move to a much more modular commercial off-the-shelf approach.

Electronic News:    What are the opportunities in this wireless communications decade for Intel?

Mentzer: The first one is WiFi. WiFi will be in everything. You look at the digital home and people putting it in set top boxes and digital media adapters. And WiFi is not just in the enterprise and the home but also in public hot spots. About every 4 seconds another public access point for WiFi goes live.

Then we see WiMax as the vehicle to really deliver broadband wireless data services initially to residences and 802.11 backhauls and businesses. But as it evolves it will actually be going mobile.

Ultimately we see an overlay network that doesn't care what device you have.  There's going to be this network of networks. It will be somewhat aware, so if you are in Truckee, Calif. where you have a low data rate it will know to deliver low-resolution pictures instead of high resolution.

There's a lot that must happen to deploy these networks. And all of this is not going to happen at once. I think it will take a decade.

Electronic News:    Do you see Intel at every node of this network of networks?

Mentzer: I see Intel as the leading building block supplier to this broadband wireless decade. I see Intel as an industry leader in establishing the standards and ecosystem, which is not new. Those things are our core competence.

Electronic News:    How complex are those issues?

Mentzer: If there were no legacy it would be pretty easy.  The problem is that companies already have networks that are deployed and network infrastructure is like poured concrete -- you just don't rip it up.

So the technical side of me says it's pretty easy. It's the business issues associated with this incredible momentum that can pose a challenge.

It's not going to be a forklift upgrade of the network. We are going to see these overlay networks come in. As WiMax comes out it'll add new capabilities and will do that in a way consistent with existing networks and business models that are out there. These are revolutionary technologies that will get deployed in evolutionary ways.

The cumulative effect of all his will be something that will be as big as the Internet was. It's fundamentally going to change the way people work, live and play.

Electronic News:    What challenges lie ahead to your vision of a broadband wireless decade?

Mentzer: There are regulatory issues. This is a case where I think the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has been pretty forward looking.

But on a worldwide basis how do you get every single country agree on these networks? We are never going to get economies of scale if everyone picks a different frequency. 

The technical challenges are how do you minimize interference and maximize distance. There are also technical challenges around quality of service.  If you are just surfing the Internet you don't have the same QOS issues that you have on a voice call. If you get more than about 250 milliseconds of delay in a voice call, it'll drive you nuts.

Again, these are things we are already working on and pretty much know how to solve or are close to solving.

There are also huge challenges how do you secure the network. We've seen this on the Web with denial of service attacks or maybe someone does the same to your phone call. They clog the airways. So how do we deal with these security issues? How we authenticate someone and let them on the network, and also how do you prevent someone from doing something malicious? There are a lot of things like this that we are working on.

Electronic News:   Is there a place in the future for wired voice or data services?

Mentzer: Well, as I said, communications infrastructure is like poured concrete. It doesn’t go away. In the United States there is a heck of a lot of cable sitting beneath the ground that no one is going to dig up. DSL is going to be a very significant technology here.  In countries that have a wired infrastructure there's going to be technology that deliver great communication over that infrastructure.

But largely we are starting to reach the point where that is running out of steam. We're really getting to the point now where we are getting just about as much bandwidth as we can out of that. Now I don't want to be saying that there's no more innovation there. There's definitely innovation there. Ten years ago if you'd have asked me can we run a Gigabit over copper I'm not sure I would have foreseen that. And we are doing that now. But there's no doubt that the rate of innovation on how to push technology over wires is absolutely slowing.

Fiber is probably the ideal when it comes to delivering the best communications channel. And fiber is what the Internet backbone runs on. Fiber is going to continue to be the technology that the Internet backbone runs on.

But this vision about fiber to home we just don't see happening for business reasons.  It's expensive to dig up the streets. The fiber is cheap. But the labor to dig up grandma's rosebushes and lay it in is what is really expensive. Some countries, like Japan, have just done it. But I just don't think it will be the prevalent technology for how people access the Internet, make phone calls or get entertained.

And that leaves wireless.

Electronic News:    What about coaxial cable?

Mentzer: Well, where that exists, it's great. In the United States we have a very mature coax network. It has been in place for some time. That's what I've got.

But it doesn't exist in many parts of the world. In green field deployments, wireless will be very important. Emerging markets are extremely important to our business. These emerging countries are adopting new technologies faster than the United States. There are more people in Korea on high speed Internet than in the United States percentage wise.

When I look at it from an Intel business opportunity perspective, a lot of these new technologies are going to be deployed first in other countries.

Electronic News:    What are the European and Asia Pacific opportunities for Intel's Communications Group

Mentzer: We see the most rapid deployment of new systems in Asia Pacific. The United States and Europe are continuing to upgrade but they largely have a pretty good core network.

The opportunity in the United States and Europe is at the edge. These areas are not building new networks. What they are doing is trying to figure out how to deploy new clients and new services with some new network capability.

Electronic News:    What are some of the more interesting new companies out there in the communications space?

Mentzer: Intel Capital will be interested in companies that are doing smart antennas or mesh technologies or good modulation techniques or compression techniques.

There's a lot of stuff going around in the modularization side too. There are companies that are figuring out how to build network infrastructure in a modular way, whether that means operating systems or protocol stacks or blades or something else.  You want to create a ecosystem that allows customers to go off and say "I'm going to use this blade, this operating system, this protocol stack, and then put their value on how they integrate and create an overall network rather than writing their own operating system, designing their own ASICs and designing their own power supplies.

Electronic News:    How is the economy going to affect this communication evolution?

Mentzer: We'll I'm not an economist; I'm a technical guy. But I think with that caveat I would turn it around and say this communications evolution will accelerate the economy. I really believe that the kinds of things that are deployed are things that can really help propel the economy.

Electronic News:    What is the big thing that worries you these days?

Mentzer: The thing that I worry about is making the right bets. There are a lot of promising technologies, smart antennas, WiMax, digital home, digital office. Where do you make your big bets?

We truly think WiMax is one of the best bets.