Various papers and web sites this week are seeing the unveiling of a new Personal Area Network technology by a company that Intel has invested in, as something of an about turn for Intel, moving it away from its attachment to the WiMedia Alliance and its Wireless USB investments.
It may well be the case and at the very least Ozmo Devices is way of making the area around a PC more wi-fi friendly rather than give in to the impulse to add Bluetooth connectivity to PC peripherals using the same radio technology used in Wireless USB.
The move is aimed at using existing wi-fi on the PC to talk to a nearby device like a headset, or a wireless mouse. It has already signed peripheral manufacturers like Belkin to the cause aiming to build a new class of wireless device using extremely low-power Wi-Fi. Effectively it saves the addition of a Bluetooth radio to each PC peripheral and PC.
Ozmo Devices was founded as H-Stream Wireless in December 2004 and is private, funded by Granite Ventures, Intel Capital, and Tallwood Venture Capital and major peripheral manufacturers are sampling the Ozmo chips now.
Critics point out that a PC can only connect to one Wi-Fi connection at a time right now, and that’s why this is seen as part of the Intel strategy. Earlier this year it introduced the idea of its ‘Cliffside’ technology which allows multiple wi-fi connections at once. The idea is that a proprietary system that Intel has developed will be offered up to the standards community and allow devices to identify themselves rather like Bluetooth does, and carry out a private negotiation about what resources each device is allowed to communicate with.
That way a PC can talk to a LAN but also have its own Wi-Fi Personal Area Network supporting up to eight Wi-Fi enabled devices. This will allow for MP3 synchronization, talking directly to a friend’s PC or your own camera or video camera, the TV, a local printer or a portable gaming device or projector.
This was all rolled out at the Intel Developer Forum two months back, and now Ozmo is perhaps getting in on the opportunity it will create. The entire construct is vitally important to the Ultra Mobile PC, which will need to be light and portable and yet be able to talk to all of these devices wirelessly.
As such this is Intel straddling two horses in mid-stream, wireless USB and Wi-Fi, and clearly while it might say that it is supporting both, it is getting ready to dump the underlying technology in Wireless USB, which is its own Multiband OFDM from the WiMedia Alliance, and how long will it be before low power Wi-Fi with Cliffside is put up as a replacement to Multiband OFDM.
Given that Ultra Wide Band Multiband OFDM has also been pushed as the basis for the next generation of BlueTooth, if Intel sticks to its guns and backs a common carrier signal for USB and BlueTooth, why wouldn’t the same radios support PAN communication. Given that at least one faction in Intel (Centrino group) doesn’t seem to think this is a good idea, there is every reason to doubt Intel’s commitment to Wireless USB.