Thanks to Torsten for this one -- everybody's talking today about Intel's announcement that it will be making WiMAX cards available this year. The chipmaker had planned to release the cards in 2007, but now says it will have them for laptops in the second half of 2006.


Sean Maloney, General Manager of Intel's Mobility Group, made the announcement during a keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Maloney also demonstrated a chip that merged WiMAX and Wi-Fi technologies, and said the company plans to offer such merged solutions within the next three years.


According to Macworld, Maloney also demonstrated a prototype mobile WiMAX solution. "Maloney used an 802.16e PC Card in a notebook that was attached to an electric scooter and was based on Intel's Napa platform," writes IDG News Service reporter Stephen Lawson. "The system delivered about 2 Mbps of throughput and supported a live video blog from a camera on the scooter, as well as presenting driving directions and a real-time weather forecast from the Web."


But according to Telecoms.com, Mark Newman, Chief Research Officer at Informa Telecoms & Media, urges caution in response to these announcements. "Intel is making a lot of noise about this now in response to the growing interest in laptops embedded with HSDPA and EV-DO chips," he says. "Over the next couple of years, we're going to see mobile operators pitching wireless broadband - based on HSDPA and EV-DO - as a superior alternative to Wi-Fi because it offers wide area coverage and automatic roaming. It's going to be some time before WiMAX networks are rolled out to offer anything that is vaguely competitive."