Inside the notebook of 2006

So what's the next thing we'll see in your radios? GPRS? 3G?
Probably not. I'll tell you what our strategy is: we stay focused on industry standards that can have a global basis. IEEE specs work beautifully for us; we design to those and we have a product that will work anywhere. GPRS and 3G -- we can work with that, but we concentrate on making sure that Centrino works in the wireless LAN and the wireless WAN environment seamlessly.

The first thing we're doing is building EAP-SIM [a standard for authenticating wireless LAN access with mobile phone SIM cards using GSM worldwide] into our triband solution. So when we ship that with Sonoma [next-generation Centrino], you will be able to authenticate with wireless LAN and WAN seamlessly, and then we're working with carriers to make sure that their services validate their WAN offerings against our wireless LAN products.

In terms of integrating GPRS or 3G it with the chipset, I don't see that happening in the near future. The solutions are so disparate across the globe. The one we are looking at is WiMAX, particularly the mobility specification, 802.16e. That does offer the prospect of broadband wireless access across the planet. It'll be deployed first for last-mile Internet access. It has more promise than 3G, for notebooks.

When will we see 802.16e?
You'll get lots of opinions on that depending on who you talk to at Intel. We will have silicon on it certainly this year. You'll see 802.16 in notebooks, well, it's difficult to say. I think 2006. That's the timeframe I'm comfortable with.

At the moment, if you lose your laptop you can lose a lot of private data as well. Are you doing anything to prevent a lost laptop from revealing a lot of personal information to whoever gets your hardware?
We are looking at how you protect your data. A lot of the investments we're making on La Grande will address that, and some other things we're doing that we aren't talking about.