Cisco in wireless technology giveaway

NEWS Cisco Systems is to offer its latest wireless access technology royalty-free to ten major IT vendors, including EDS, Motorola and Toshiba. The technology was developed in association with Texas Instruments, but now Cisco plans to seed the market by offering it to third-party manufacturers for free. The ten companies - Bechtel Telecommunications, Broadcom, EDS, KPMG Consulting, LCC International, Motorola, Pace Micro Technology, Samsung, Texas Instruments and Toshiba - have signed up as official Cisco partners, and will avoid paying royalties on the wireless technology as a result. Cisco claims the deal will speed up the introduction of broadband wireless Internet access to consumers and business customers. Peter Crowcombe, director of service provider networks, Europe at Infomatics Research said: "It's potentially huge. Cisco is partnering with a number of other technology providers, mainly non-competitive, to build a common platform for broadband wireless, and in that respect, what they are doing is a smart idea and should be positive for the industry." Crowcombe added that it will give Cisco an opportunity to tap into the consumer market as well. "Because of the many product directions that organisations such as Samsung and Toshiba are moving in, it could deliver connectivity right into the home - into the devices within the home. The potential for this technology is vast," he said. Cisco originally acquired the wireless access technology through its $157m buyout of Clarity Wireless Corporation at the end of 1998. The ten technology partners will now work to standardise the technology under the name VOFDM (Vector Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing).