In a major win for chip maker Atheros Communications, four major laptop manufacturers
will be embedding Atheros chips in their laptop products to provide dual-band
support for 802.11b and 802.11a… and in one case, 802.11g, as well.
This pits Atheros directly against Intel a customer
of Atheros. Notebooks will be coming out soon supporting Intel’s Centrino chipset,
which combines a Pentium-M processor with other chips including embedded Wi-Fi.
Initial Centrino products will support 802.11b, but eventually Intel will move
them to dual-band 802.11a/b.
The products with Atheros chips include the already shipping IBM
ThinkPad R40, Toshiba
Satellite Pro 6100, and the NEC B5 Laptop Lave J (currently only in Japan), all with 802.11a/b support
built in via an internal miniPCI card.
Upcoming with the Atheros AR5001X chip will be products
from Hewlett-Packard, which will support 802.11a/b/g, a well as security
functions for 802.1X and VPNs. Details on when HP’s tri-mode laptop will ship
are not available yet. Atheros doesn’t expect to have its 802.11g solution ready
for a while anyway, though the chips are sampling with customers now.
"These are the first of many models to come from these vendors,"
says Rich Redelfs, president and chief executive officer of Atheros
In a study Atheros commissioned last year, "we saw…that people want
[Wi-Fi] embedded, they don’t want PCMCIA cards," according to Redelfs.
Using dual band 802.11a/b/g support also means users don’t have to worry about
how to connect and large enterprises get more channels to work with. Vendors
avoid having multiple versions of the product and have fewer support calls when
someone gets a product with the "wrong kind of Wi-Fi."
Support in the laptops a key differentiator for them from PC Card Wi-Fi because
the Atheros embedded chips use software drivers.
"Our MAC can be updated without being flashed, it’s a driver based solution,"
says Redelfs. "It’s much easier to just load additional software on the
PC."
The Atheros chips in these laptops supports a proprietary 802.11a Turbo Mode
that boosts the link speed up to 108Mbps. This Turbo mode only works when the
laptop connects to an 802.11a access point also using Atheros chips.
Redelfs also says that the second generation of Atheros chips, which are currently
shipping, doubled the range of the first, and he expects the range to increase
again in the chips to come from the third generation later this year.
