Atheros made waves in 2001 when it shipped the first commercial 802.11a chipsets. While these first-generation designs offered limited range, Atheros continued to improve its technology, first by delivering more integrated chipset offerings and later by delivering multimode, multiband chipsets with support for 802.11a/b/g. In addition to chipsets, Atheros developed successful NIC and access-point reference designs. The company went public in February 2004.
While Atheros was making a name for itself as a WLAN chip start-up, Broadcom, a network-semiconductor giant with significant market share in Ethernet and cable modem chipsets, entered the 802.11b WLAN market in 2002. Broadcom later introduced 802.11g and multiband 802.11a/b/g chipsets and has enjoyed significant success in this market, particularly with notebook manufacturers and consumer-oriented WLAN vendors.
We"ve seen many WLAN chipset players over the past five years. Texas Instruments, for example, has enjoyed significant success in this market, shipping 14 million WLAN ports in 2003. Other
vendors have not fared so well, victims of intense competition and a general reluctance by established manufacturers to stray too far from leading names.
That leads back to Intel, which blitzed the media in 2003 with its Centrino WLAN offering. Although Intel has had a positive impact on the WLAN industry by raising awareness, the Centrino WLAN offering is technologically inferior to competing systems. In fact, very little of the underlying silicon found in the Centrino embedded WLAN NIC was developed by Intel. The company continues to work on developing its own WLAN silicon and expects to release products this year.
Pending 6GHz spectrum availability, faster speeds, and private wireless access use drive FWA forward.
The new HPE Aruba 730 series Wi-Fi 7 access points tout high performance, enhanced security, location tracking capabilities, and more.
Verizon is demoing crowd analytics technology that uses 5G along with AI and mobile edge computing to give stadium operators insights into the flow of fans throughout a venue.
