11 ms·

Intel couldn't make WiMax work right (too power hungry and low speed), their attempts to build an LTE chip have fared worse than Samsung and Qualcomm, to the po

Intel couldn't make WiMax work right (too power hungry and low speed), their attempts to build an LTE chip have fared worse than Samsung and Qualcomm, to the point that they are a full 5 years behind their competitors, and their cable modem chipsets (Puma 6/7, used in the Xfinity converged gateway) are fatally flawed and DoSable with a few Kbps of traffic, while having horrible bufferbloat. At this point I think Intel's entire advantage over the past two decades was being on the bleeding edge of silicon processes, paired with a middling silicon design team and good firmware devs that could patch most flaws in microcode. The process lead has disappeared, and when working with RF frontends (LTE, WiMax, cable modems, WiFi) their ability to cover up implementation errors in the driver is limited. Intel's prospects for the next few years look dim in this context, given the tens of billions wasted on the aformentioned forays into making radio chipsets and the declining revenue of their legacy CPU market paired with serious manufacuting constraints that have hamstrung their supply chain.

bgorman 7y ago
To me this is kind of strange, I thought Intel had a good reputation as far as Ethernet and Wireless drivers were concerned. Certainly much better than (old) Broadcom, Realtek, Ralink, ST and the like.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wmf 7y ago
  I wonder if all Intel's acquisitions have failed while homegrown efforts succeeded.
- metildaa 7y ago
  I specifically called out Intel's software team as competent/good. They are obviously able to take buggy silicon and make it do impressive things, but when it comes to shaping and interpreting analog RF waves it seems this is outside their capability to tune much beyond what they've done. Broadcom comparatively has crap drivers and decent silicon, meaning your cable modem works fine (with no bufferbloat or jitter issues), but good luck with that random WiFi chipset on Linux :P
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    My experience is that Intel software is crap. For instance my biz dev guy thought that Intel's graph processing toolkit based on Hadoop would be the bee's knees and I didn't have to look at it to know that it was going to be something a junior dev knocked out in two weeks that moves about 20x more data to get the same result as what I knocked out in two days. NVIDIA, on the other hand, impresses me with drivers and release engineering. Once I learned how to bypass their GUI installer I came to appreciate what a good job they do. (They gotta have that GUI installer otherwise some dummy with a Radeon card or Intel Integrated 'Graphics' will post on their forum about how the drivers don't work.)
    - metildaa 7y ago
      NVidia still equals NoVideo in my book, for a time it seemed like every other driver release would brick your card, and Linux support is abysmal. Wayland still isn't supported, despite AMD, Intel and even no-name HDMI Phy manufacturers fully supporting it.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - mr_toad 7y ago
      > They gotta have that GUI installer otherwise some dummy with a Radeon card or Intel Integrated 'Graphics' will post on their forum about how the drivers don't work. Maybe they need a GUI, but it doesn’t need to be such a bloated monstrosity.
      - caspper69 7y ago
        It's because they include game patches in the drivers.
    - xvilka 7y ago
      NVIDIA is the worst video card for Linux, if you don't want to install their blobs.
- fopen64 7y ago
  RF is difficult.
  - madengr 7y ago
    Yep, mostly done by graybeards, which Intel probably fired.
    - dfrage 7y ago
      Using stack ranking to fire 10-15% of their employees every year selects for people who have political talents. Aren't they now comprehensively failing in every area except microarchitectures, with the next Ice Lake one being held up by the 10 nm node debacle?
      - tinus_hn 7y ago
        If they are using stack ranking they deserve to fail.
- WeakLanguage 7y ago
  On Ethernet, Intel is known for their little frills, stable line of NICs. That said, they have not been a leader since the jump to 10Gbps. Their 10Gbps line eventually came along and is solid, but it was a few years behind everyone else. That same story seems to be repeating itself at every new ethernet standard over the past decade. Come to think of it, the last decade has been really bad for Intel. They no longer have a node advantage. They no longer have a performance advantage in any market space that I can think of outside of frequency hungry low-thread applications (games). Their WiFi chips are good, but second tier. Their Modem chips are third tier. Their node is mostly on par with the competition, for now. Their CPUs are trading blows with AMD. Their ethernet chips are a generation behind. Optane is is a bright spot, but we'll see how they squander that. The next big diversification play by Intel is GPUs, I have no idea how that will pan out.
  - metildaa 7y ago
    Optane will be squandered by limited CPU support and slim software support :c Optane is a neat idea, but the severe change in software architecture combined with only select CPUs even supporting it will limit uptake outside FAANGs or organizations with really specialized needs.
    - Tostino 7y ago
      Databases will love Optane. There have been companies showing how much they are willing to spend on database hardware and software for ages. I'm not sure that will change any time soon.
      - metildaa 7y ago
        Yep, exactly what I was getting at. If you have a giant database and a big budget, Optane is great. It could be really useful for smaller users too, but its unlikely to become widely popular as the average developer won't have it available in their laptop or desktop.
      - dman 7y ago
        Not so sure about this. World is increasingly moving to distributed scale out databases. Once you go that way consensus algorithms and rpc costs dwarf disk io speed.
- shaklee3 7y ago
  Intel is faaaaaaar behind on NICs. They're just now releasing an asic capable of 100G, while their competitors have had one for many years, and are now moving to 200G. I think they were hoping omnipath took off.
billions 7y ago
Intel's x86 business is not far behind
PaulHoule 7y ago
Intel could not resist bufferbloat. I have a book about UPnP written by some Intel engineers and it describes a bastardization of http that is so insane that there is no way I would trust the company to embed an http server inside its management engine. It just wouldn't be possible with an attitude like that to get security right. Maybe INTC went up tonight because investors know now that Intel will stop wasting money on ads proclaiming themselves to be the leader in the 5G "race". (How come nobody cares about the finish line?)
- tyopiuy 7y ago
  What is bufferbloat
  - metildaa 7y ago
    When your buffers are too big for the connection, it induces latency as your computer sends 100Mbps of traffic, yet the modem is capped to say 5Mbps. Its better to drop this traffic as TCP/IP and UDP will throttle itself, rather than letting 500ms to 1 second of latency be induced by holding that data in a buffer, resulting in a jerky user experience. Edit: Most Comcast/Xfinity modems and converged gateways are Intel based and have this and other issues, pure garbage devices.
    - ianai 7y ago
      Any cable modem brands known to not use bufferbloat-ing NICs?
      - wtallis 7y ago
        DOCSIS 3.1 standard introduced a good but not great Active Queue Management scheme called PIE. But upgrading your modem only helps with traffic you're sending; your ISP needs to upgrade their equipment to manage the buffers at their end of the bottleneck in order to prevent your downloads from causing excessive induced latency.
        7y ago
mcbridematt 7y ago
Also note that LTE and cable modems both came to Intel as a result of acquisition (LTE from Infineon and cable+DSL from Infineon via their Lantiq spinoff). Both times they have tried to put an x86 core around the modem part with varying success.
- rfdave 7y ago
  They've also picked up the Ex-Motorola RFIC team in Phoenix. Integrating those two teams 9 time zones away I'm sure went poorly. I worked with both of those teams, and they're both sharp. I'm sure the integration was tough, and obviously went poorly.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  There is a good chance the top talent at both jumped ship either before the acquisition, or immediately after, leaving the dregs and predictable results.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Reducing costs through 'synergy' is easier to quantify and link to bonuses and annual objectives than maintaining technical quality.
ww520 7y ago
And on the fab area, they are being beaten by TSMC. It looks like they are falling behind across fronts.
shard972 7y ago
I don't think you should count intel down and out just yet, over the past few years they have been one of the few tech companies actually committed to diversity. Sure they had a couple bad years but now they have a talent pool deeper than any of the competitors so I'm still betting on them to turn this around and bounce back even stronger.
- ancorevard 7y ago
  "one of the few tech companies actually committed to diversity." What does that even mean?
  - eatbitseveryday 7y ago
    Increasing hiring of non-white non-male individuals to the employee pool. Not sure what it has to do with the technical discussion.
    - sundbry 7y ago
      Perhaps the continuous executive push for cheaper international labor is having an impact on their core competence. Who could have known.
DuckConference 7y ago
If they can ship 10nm in reasonable volume soon, they can get their process lead back a bit, assuming their claims that its better than the 7nm foundry processes are true.
Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
> The process lead has disappeared, and when working with RF frontends (LTE, WiMax, cable modems, WiFi) their ability to cover up implementation errors in the driver is limited. Why would that be the case? Why would those functions be harder to fix in code/microcode than a CPU's functions?
signa11 7y ago
> Intel couldn't make WiMax work right... well imho, the _real_ reason why wimax failed had more to do with lack of compatibility with existing (at that time) 3g standards than anything else, and this was despite the fact that lte was delayed ! operators had already spent lots of money in deploying 3g, and were wary (genuinely so) of sinking money in something that was brand new when lte was just around the corner... also, imho (once again), technological challenges (as you pointed out above) are _rarely_ an issue (if ever) in determining the marketplace success / failure...
- Tor3 7y ago
  wimax is still used in Japan, mainly for "pocket wi-fi" gadgets which you can buy or rent (the latter mainly for visitors or tourists). They compete with LTE but there's still a market because they don't have completely overlapping feature sets w.r.t. coverage and bandwidth.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    WiMAX is dead in Japan. You can't get new devices on it, half of the spectrum has been refarmed to LTE (leaving speeds in the single-digit Mbits) and the network is shutting down by next year. There's a WiMAX brand selling "WiMAX 2+" but that is just LTE.
    - Tor3 7y ago
      Thanks for the update. I checked out the situation a few times the last two or three years or so (the last time more than a year ago), and things are apparently changing (also re. the next post). At one point there certainly was wimax though, the coverage / area was quite different.
      - kalleboo 7y ago
        They don't make it easy to understand what's going on since they still have a toggle between "LTE" and "WiMAX" that you can switch. The former is fast metered MVNO data on the main carrier of the telco that owns them and latter is "unlimited" data on their own separate radio spectrum with different coverage. But the latter is still actually LTE. I actually still have a legacy wimax device and plan active since it was the last plan with true unlimited with zero "fair use". It also had a usage scale so on months I don't use it it's only 300 yen. So a good backup device. I've loaned it out to people who had have to spend a week in hospital (no wifi) and they've burned through 30 GB streaming video with no issues. They send me letters every couple months urging me to upgrade to a new plan that all cost 4000/mo and have fair use data caps.
alehul 7y ago
This comment made me want to investigate Intel's financials and see whether this qualitative story matches their quantitative data, but it seems to be the opposite: Revenue grew last quarter almost 20% YoY to ~$20B Net income has been up 40%-80% each quarter YoY, to ~$5B While I do believe what was said above, it seems that whatever choices they are making that supposedly are resulting in a failing company from an engineering perspective, are resulting in a successful company from a financial perspective.
- kjsbfkjbf 7y ago
  > While I do believe what was said above, it seems that whatever choices they are making that supposedly are resulting in a failing company from an engineering perspective, are resulting in a successful company from a financial perspective. Finances for big brands can be lagging indicators.
- jsight 7y ago
  Yeah, revenue of $80B/year can cover a lot of failed growth projects, even multibillion dollar ones. I think the only point that I disagree with in the OP is the idea that there is declining revenue in the "legacy CPU" market. It seems like there is still a long trajectory of slow growth there at worst.
  - metildaa 7y ago
    Intel is strip mining its current customers by jacking up newer server chip prices and discontinuing their older chips (due to 10nm fabs not being ready). Intel is producing few low-end chips(i3/i5), which has in part caused the current Ram glut. These large customers that have caused a temporary surge in profit are in the process of migrating away from Intel.
AbacusAvenger 7y ago
I don't think they'll back out of RF tech entirely. The best WiFi chipsets I've used in recent years have been Intel-vended, and they're broadly used. On the other hand, I've been bitten by Broadcom WiFi chipsets too much recently -- two different laptops with different Broadcom chips having a variety of different connectivity problems. One of them would spontaneously drop the WiFi connection when doing a TCP streaming workload (downloading a large file via HTTP/HTTPS). Admittedly this was probably some kind of driver issue, but I wasn't excited about the prospect of using an out-of-tree driver on Linux to solve the problem (and that didn't help my Windows install either). I swapped the mini-PCIe boards out with some Intel wireless cards and they've been running perfectly since. But of course, if the rest of the business suffers, they may have to make cuts all over the place. I just hope the WiFi stuff doesn't end up on the chopping block or the competition improves.
- rstuart4133 7y ago
  I also chose Intel over other vendors. I don't know why. It is true Intel's stuff is better intergrated better into the WinTel ecosystem than the others, so it's probably true Intel gear gave less trouble on my laptop. But then I deployed lots of boxes with WiFi, that had to work in remote locations where others depended on it. I'm ashamed to say I just shipped the first couple with the Intel cards provided by manufacturer. But after getting a lot of complaints I actually tested it. Which is to say I purchased all the makes and models of 10 WiFi mPCI cards I could find on eBay, collected as many random access points as I could and lots of laptops (over 50), put them all into a room and tested the network to collapse. Intel's cards were the most expensive, and also the worst performing. They collapsed at around 13 laptops. The best 801.11ac cards were Atheros (now owned by Qualcomm), and they were also the cheapest. Broadcomm were about the middle, but I had the most driver problems with them. My pre-conceived but untested notions were shattered.

bgorman 7y ago

To me this is kind of strange, I thought Intel had a good reputation as far as Ethernet and Wireless drivers were concerned. Certainly much better than (old) Broadcom, Realtek, Ralink, ST and the like.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wmf 7y ago
I wonder if all Intel's acquisitions have failed while homegrown efforts succeeded.
metildaa 7y ago
I specifically called out Intel's software team as competent/good. They are obviously able to take buggy silicon and make it do impressive things, but when it comes to shaping and interpreting analog RF waves it seems this is outside their capability to tune much beyond what they've done. Broadcom comparatively has crap drivers and decent silicon, meaning your cable modem works fine (with no bufferbloat or jitter issues), but good luck with that random WiFi chipset on Linux :P
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  My experience is that Intel software is crap. For instance my biz dev guy thought that Intel's graph processing toolkit based on Hadoop would be the bee's knees and I didn't have to look at it to know that it was going to be something a junior dev knocked out in two weeks that moves about 20x more data to get the same result as what I knocked out in two days. NVIDIA, on the other hand, impresses me with drivers and release engineering. Once I learned how to bypass their GUI installer I came to appreciate what a good job they do. (They gotta have that GUI installer otherwise some dummy with a Radeon card or Intel Integrated 'Graphics' will post on their forum about how the drivers don't work.)
  - metildaa 7y ago
    NVidia still equals NoVideo in my book, for a time it seemed like every other driver release would brick your card, and Linux support is abysmal. Wayland still isn't supported, despite AMD, Intel and even no-name HDMI Phy manufacturers fully supporting it.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - mr_toad 7y ago
    > They gotta have that GUI installer otherwise some dummy with a Radeon card or Intel Integrated 'Graphics' will post on their forum about how the drivers don't work. Maybe they need a GUI, but it doesn’t need to be such a bloated monstrosity.
    - caspper69 7y ago
      It's because they include game patches in the drivers.
  - xvilka 7y ago
    NVIDIA is the worst video card for Linux, if you don't want to install their blobs.
fopen64 7y ago
RF is difficult.
- madengr 7y ago
  Yep, mostly done by graybeards, which Intel probably fired.
  - dfrage 7y ago
    Using stack ranking to fire 10-15% of their employees every year selects for people who have political talents. Aren't they now comprehensively failing in every area except microarchitectures, with the next Ice Lake one being held up by the 10 nm node debacle?
    - tinus_hn 7y ago
      If they are using stack ranking they deserve to fail.
WeakLanguage 7y ago
On Ethernet, Intel is known for their little frills, stable line of NICs. That said, they have not been a leader since the jump to 10Gbps. Their 10Gbps line eventually came along and is solid, but it was a few years behind everyone else. That same story seems to be repeating itself at every new ethernet standard over the past decade. Come to think of it, the last decade has been really bad for Intel. They no longer have a node advantage. They no longer have a performance advantage in any market space that I can think of outside of frequency hungry low-thread applications (games). Their WiFi chips are good, but second tier. Their Modem chips are third tier. Their node is mostly on par with the competition, for now. Their CPUs are trading blows with AMD. Their ethernet chips are a generation behind. Optane is is a bright spot, but we'll see how they squander that. The next big diversification play by Intel is GPUs, I have no idea how that will pan out.
- metildaa 7y ago
  Optane will be squandered by limited CPU support and slim software support :c Optane is a neat idea, but the severe change in software architecture combined with only select CPUs even supporting it will limit uptake outside FAANGs or organizations with really specialized needs.
  - Tostino 7y ago
    Databases will love Optane. There have been companies showing how much they are willing to spend on database hardware and software for ages. I'm not sure that will change any time soon.
    - metildaa 7y ago
      Yep, exactly what I was getting at. If you have a giant database and a big budget, Optane is great. It could be really useful for smaller users too, but its unlikely to become widely popular as the average developer won't have it available in their laptop or desktop.
    - dman 7y ago
      Not so sure about this. World is increasingly moving to distributed scale out databases. Once you go that way consensus algorithms and rpc costs dwarf disk io speed.
shaklee3 7y ago
Intel is faaaaaaar behind on NICs. They're just now releasing an asic capable of 100G, while their competitors have had one for many years, and are now moving to 200G. I think they were hoping omnipath took off.

billions 7y ago

Intel's x86 business is not far behind

PaulHoule 7y ago

Intel could not resist bufferbloat. I have a book about UPnP written by some Intel engineers and it describes a bastardization of http that is so insane that there is no way I would trust the company to embed an http server inside its management engine. It just wouldn't be possible with an attitude like that to get security right. Maybe INTC went up tonight because investors know now that Intel will stop wasting money on ads proclaiming themselves to be the leader in the 5G "race". (How come nobody cares about the finish line?)

tyopiuy 7y ago
What is bufferbloat
- metildaa 7y ago
  When your buffers are too big for the connection, it induces latency as your computer sends 100Mbps of traffic, yet the modem is capped to say 5Mbps. Its better to drop this traffic as TCP/IP and UDP will throttle itself, rather than letting 500ms to 1 second of latency be induced by holding that data in a buffer, resulting in a jerky user experience. Edit: Most Comcast/Xfinity modems and converged gateways are Intel based and have this and other issues, pure garbage devices.
  - ianai 7y ago
    Any cable modem brands known to not use bufferbloat-ing NICs?
    - wtallis 7y ago
      DOCSIS 3.1 standard introduced a good but not great Active Queue Management scheme called PIE. But upgrading your modem only helps with traffic you're sending; your ISP needs to upgrade their equipment to manage the buffers at their end of the bottleneck in order to prevent your downloads from causing excessive induced latency.
      - 7y ago

mcbridematt 7y ago

Also note that LTE and cable modems both came to Intel as a result of acquisition (LTE from Infineon and cable+DSL from Infineon via their Lantiq spinoff). Both times they have tried to put an x86 core around the modem part with varying success.

rfdave 7y ago
They've also picked up the Ex-Motorola RFIC team in Phoenix. Integrating those two teams 9 time zones away I'm sure went poorly. I worked with both of those teams, and they're both sharp. I'm sure the integration was tough, and obviously went poorly.
throwaway2048 7y ago
There is a good chance the top talent at both jumped ship either before the acquisition, or immediately after, leaving the dregs and predictable results.
- simonh 7y ago
  Reducing costs through 'synergy' is easier to quantify and link to bonuses and annual objectives than maintaining technical quality.

ww520 7y ago

And on the fab area, they are being beaten by TSMC. It looks like they are falling behind across fronts.

shard972 7y ago

I don't think you should count intel down and out just yet, over the past few years they have been one of the few tech companies actually committed to diversity. Sure they had a couple bad years but now they have a talent pool deeper than any of the competitors so I'm still betting on them to turn this around and bounce back even stronger.

ancorevard 7y ago
"one of the few tech companies actually committed to diversity." What does that even mean?
- eatbitseveryday 7y ago
  Increasing hiring of non-white non-male individuals to the employee pool. Not sure what it has to do with the technical discussion.
  - sundbry 7y ago
    Perhaps the continuous executive push for cheaper international labor is having an impact on their core competence. Who could have known.

DuckConference 7y ago

If they can ship 10nm in reasonable volume soon, they can get their process lead back a bit, assuming their claims that its better than the 7nm foundry processes are true.

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago

> The process lead has disappeared, and when working with RF frontends (LTE, WiMax, cable modems, WiFi) their ability to cover up implementation errors in the driver is limited. Why would that be the case? Why would those functions be harder to fix in code/microcode than a CPU's functions?

signa11 7y ago

> Intel couldn't make WiMax work right... well imho, the _real_ reason why wimax failed had more to do with lack of compatibility with existing (at that time) 3g standards than anything else, and this was despite the fact that lte was delayed ! operators had already spent lots of money in deploying 3g, and were wary (genuinely so) of sinking money in something that was brand new when lte was just around the corner... also, imho (once again), technological challenges (as you pointed out above) are _rarely_ an issue (if ever) in determining the marketplace success / failure...

Tor3 7y ago
wimax is still used in Japan, mainly for "pocket wi-fi" gadgets which you can buy or rent (the latter mainly for visitors or tourists). They compete with LTE but there's still a market because they don't have completely overlapping feature sets w.r.t. coverage and bandwidth.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  WiMAX is dead in Japan. You can't get new devices on it, half of the spectrum has been refarmed to LTE (leaving speeds in the single-digit Mbits) and the network is shutting down by next year. There's a WiMAX brand selling "WiMAX 2+" but that is just LTE.
  - Tor3 7y ago
    Thanks for the update. I checked out the situation a few times the last two or three years or so (the last time more than a year ago), and things are apparently changing (also re. the next post). At one point there certainly was wimax though, the coverage / area was quite different.
    - kalleboo 7y ago
      They don't make it easy to understand what's going on since they still have a toggle between "LTE" and "WiMAX" that you can switch. The former is fast metered MVNO data on the main carrier of the telco that owns them and latter is "unlimited" data on their own separate radio spectrum with different coverage. But the latter is still actually LTE. I actually still have a legacy wimax device and plan active since it was the last plan with true unlimited with zero "fair use". It also had a usage scale so on months I don't use it it's only 300 yen. So a good backup device. I've loaned it out to people who had have to spend a week in hospital (no wifi) and they've burned through 30 GB streaming video with no issues. They send me letters every couple months urging me to upgrade to a new plan that all cost 4000/mo and have fair use data caps.

alehul 7y ago

This comment made me want to investigate Intel's financials and see whether this qualitative story matches their quantitative data, but it seems to be the opposite: Revenue grew last quarter almost 20% YoY to ~$20B Net income has been up 40%-80% each quarter YoY, to ~$5B While I do believe what was said above, it seems that whatever choices they are making that supposedly are resulting in a failing company from an engineering perspective, are resulting in a successful company from a financial perspective.

kjsbfkjbf 7y ago
> While I do believe what was said above, it seems that whatever choices they are making that supposedly are resulting in a failing company from an engineering perspective, are resulting in a successful company from a financial perspective. Finances for big brands can be lagging indicators.
jsight 7y ago
Yeah, revenue of $80B/year can cover a lot of failed growth projects, even multibillion dollar ones. I think the only point that I disagree with in the OP is the idea that there is declining revenue in the "legacy CPU" market. It seems like there is still a long trajectory of slow growth there at worst.
- metildaa 7y ago
  Intel is strip mining its current customers by jacking up newer server chip prices and discontinuing their older chips (due to 10nm fabs not being ready). Intel is producing few low-end chips(i3/i5), which has in part caused the current Ram glut. These large customers that have caused a temporary surge in profit are in the process of migrating away from Intel.

AbacusAvenger 7y ago

I don't think they'll back out of RF tech entirely. The best WiFi chipsets I've used in recent years have been Intel-vended, and they're broadly used. On the other hand, I've been bitten by Broadcom WiFi chipsets too much recently -- two different laptops with different Broadcom chips having a variety of different connectivity problems. One of them would spontaneously drop the WiFi connection when doing a TCP streaming workload (downloading a large file via HTTP/HTTPS). Admittedly this was probably some kind of driver issue, but I wasn't excited about the prospect of using an out-of-tree driver on Linux to solve the problem (and that didn't help my Windows install either). I swapped the mini-PCIe boards out with some Intel wireless cards and they've been running perfectly since. But of course, if the rest of the business suffers, they may have to make cuts all over the place. I just hope the WiFi stuff doesn't end up on the chopping block or the competition improves.

rstuart4133 7y ago
I also chose Intel over other vendors. I don't know why. It is true Intel's stuff is better intergrated better into the WinTel ecosystem than the others, so it's probably true Intel gear gave less trouble on my laptop. But then I deployed lots of boxes with WiFi, that had to work in remote locations where others depended on it. I'm ashamed to say I just shipped the first couple with the Intel cards provided by manufacturer. But after getting a lot of complaints I actually tested it. Which is to say I purchased all the makes and models of 10 WiFi mPCI cards I could find on eBay, collected as many random access points as I could and lots of laptops (over 50), put them all into a room and tested the network to collapse. Intel's cards were the most expensive, and also the worst performing. They collapsed at around 13 laptops. The best 801.11ac cards were Atheros (now owned by Qualcomm), and they were also the cheapest. Broadcomm were about the middle, but I had the most driver problems with them. My pre-conceived but untested notions were shattered.