Sidecut Reports

Quick question: How much did you pay for the Wi-Fi chip in the last laptop you bought?

If you don’t know or can’t remember, you are making my point — having basic Wi-Fi included for free in most current portable PC pricing schemes has helped make the technology ubiquitous. Good news for chip vendors, service providers and customers, who are finding more and cheaper ways to get connected.

So why is the nascent embedded-WiMax market being saddled with seemingly absurd fees for putting WiMax into a notebook? While WiMax proponents may cheer Dell’s announcement of WiMax-enabled laptops, you have to wonder why WiMax is a $60 premium over basic Wi-Fi. Lenovo, early to the game in the embedded-WiMax department, still charges $80 to put the chip inside the chassis — a curious charge when you consider that you can get a more-flexible USB modem from Clearwire for $70 — a device you can share among laptops, personal routers or other USB-equipped gear.

Wasn’t Intel supposed to make this stuff cheap enough for OEMs to include it gratis? Or are we waiting for more Clearwire markets to launch before the promotions start? As we have noted before, the 3G cellular providers are already offering incentives. Tough to play in that game with an additional $60 ante per user.

WiMax and associated wireless news from around the Web:

Clearwire’s Live Portland Promos Are Sweet: Apparently the “cupcake” video is being brought to life on the streets of Portland, according to this report from the local paper’s tech blogger.

Home on the Open (WiMax) Range: Rural provider Open Range gets another $100 million, which should get its rural wireless plan off the ground. Sam at DailyWireless has the details, and more.

How Fast is Clearwire’s Portland Network? Senza Fili consultant Monica Paolini walks and rides the streets of Portland, speedtest meter at the ready, to see how fast (or not) the new WiMax network is. Plus she finds some good pizza.

Obama Apparently Picks New FCC Chair: Om and Stacey give the rumored incoming FCC chairman a to-do list. Not WiMax, but in the wireless wheelhouse.

More $99 3G Laptops That Actually Cost $1,539: This time Dell and AT&T pair up to offer a $99 laptop with 3G connectivity built in. The two-year contract for $60 a month, however, jacks up the “real” price to $1,539.

No, we don’t have any official confirmation, shipping dates, or any other such data to hang our headline on. But from the reporting we’ve done leading up to this week’s WiMax World show in Chicago, we feel pretty confident to predict that laptops with WiMax connectivity embedded inside should be available for purchase sometime before Halloween, probably first from Asus and Lenovo, with other potential entrants close behind.

Why are the delivery, pricing and other details still fuzzy? Blame it on the September-in-October official launch of WiMax services from the Xohm folks at Sprint, whose network-live party is on Oct. 8. This is just a guess, but it’s a pretty safe one to think that all the supporing peripheral players are being asked to wait until the network is live before divulging their product shipping plans. But despite what you may have read in other places, WiMax devices should be available in force after the network’s launch, with add-in PC cards and USB dongles followed quickly by the notebooks with WiMax chips inside, most likely as part of Intel’s dual WiMax/Wi-Fi silicon package.

(And don’t forget Nokia’s WiMax tablet, which Nokia folks say will be available veryverysoon after the Xohm network goes live in Baltimore.)

That Asus would be in the lead is hardly a surprise, since the company made a big splash of its embedded-WiMax intentions at CES way back in January. “They [Asus] have been very very aggressive” in terms of their WiMax intentions, said Julie Coppernoll, marketing director for WiMAX at Intel, in a recent interview. Lenovo, too, has been public about its intentions to offer embedded WiMax, though the company hasn’t said when yet. While Coppernoll wouldn’t divulge any shipping dates or plans (curse her!), she did say that Asus, Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba have all been actively working with Intel vis-a-vis WiMax for more than a year; use that as you will to form your betting lines. (You could also add in HP as a parlay.)

Also without naming names, Richard Keith, global director of wireless strategy at Motorola said his company (which is responsible for most of the back-end infrastructure for Sprint’s Xohm network in Chicago) is currently testing 12 different laptops with embedded WiMax from four different manufacturers, as well as a couple UMPC devices.

So who will be first manufacturer to hit the shelves at Best Buy with WiMax-embedded gear? Game on, we say. And if they’re not shipping by Halloween? Well then that WiMax-enabled gear can always make for fashionable gifts for the holiday season, provided your recipients live in Baltimore, Chicago or Washington, D.C.

UPDATE: Looks like the Xohm Baltimore network is going live today, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. (Thanks to our pal Andy Abramson for the early morning links and the kind words.) The Xohm home page also changed, and now offers pricing plans and info. More soon!

We’ll have more details and analysis in our upcoming WiMax devices report (another addition to our comprehensive Sidecut Report on WiMax), scheduled to be available as soon as possible after we digest all the information we’re sure will be provided at this week’s show. Watch this space for daily reports from Chicago, where Sprint’s WiMax network there already has 480 live tower sites and counting.

Just got back from a quick afternoon stop at the Intel Developer Forum, where I caught Dadi Perlmutter’s mobility keynote. Biggest news on the WiMax front was the announcement that Dell and Sony have joined the list of Asus, Acer, Toshiba, Lenovo and Panasonic as OEMs who say they will ship laptops with Intel WiMax chips embedded inside.

No hard ship dates yet, but Dadi did say something about Q1 availability, which was about what we expected when the chip-ship dates slipped a bit earlier this summer. There were also some cool MIDs (mobile Internet devices) hanging out, though no WiMax connectivity for testing purposes (can you say missed marketing opportunity?).

No new WiMax network updates, though Clearwire CTO John Saw (who we interviewed for our QuickCut Report on WiMax Spectrum) did address the audience via a VoIP-teleconference-over-Mobile-WiMax link. In terms of a live demo the call went fine, with no detectable jitter or latency from the cheap seats at Moscone West. Saw did use his small bit of time to take a dig at the ongoing iPhone 3G congestion issues, saying that you knew he was using something faster than 3G since there were no “buffering” messages and you could watch him wave his hand in real time.

Still, after putting a billion-six into Clearwire, you think Intel would have put together a live WiMax demo for the developer crowd, who would love geeking out in the trucks… guess we will have to wait until CES for the big WiMax marketing push. More thoughts and info later…