Taiwan signs WiMax deal with Intel

INTEL ANNOUNCED bright and early on Monday morning that they’ll be chucking $500 million Taiwan’s way, spread out over the next half a decade to develop the Island’s WiMax infrastructure. The agreement will also apparently try to promote a greater level of WiMax congruency among gear developers.

Chipzilla admits that their speedy Gonzales, long distance wireless product is still a bit of a problem child for the firm, but reckon that it’s coming along nicely now, and should have most of the kinks ironed out of it really soon, honest.

In a press conference, Lil Mohan, managing director of Intel's WiMax programme, reckoned that WiMax could even be commercially unleashed on the US public as early as this quarter or the next, whilst Asia will just have to wait it out another year or so for their infrastructure to be complete sometime in 2009 or 2010.

The Taiwanese government seems to have had an interest in WiMax for quite some time already, having already announced last year that they’d be happy to shell out about $664 on the technology, which lets users connect to the Net from up to 50 km away from the nearest antenna.

But there have been some concerns about the fact that different WiMax products built into machines made by various manufacturers, might not be interoperable. The newly signed agreement between Taiwan and Intel hopes to solve that problem, by setting up a body to oversee interoperability and to make sure that WiMax users will be able to get coverage wherever they are, whatever equipment they have.

Taiwanese computer and notebook maker Acer took the opportunity at the press conference to plug the fact that they’ll be launching new WiMax enabled laptops by early this summer. Giving his opinions on Intel’s WiMax, Acer Chairman J.T. Wang, sitting next to a whole panel of Intel people, said “It's going to be huge in the coming several years", honest.

Apart from Acer, D-Link, Zyxel and Gemtek Technology are also all apparently gearing up to flood Taiwan with their own WiMax technology offerings. µ

L’Inq
The Financial Express