"They have the advantage in terms of time to market. It's kind of an end-around [to outmaneuver Intersil.] They are just going to let the markets decide" which is the better technology rather than the IEEE, said Kurt Scherf, vice president of research at Parks Associates, a Dallas-based market research and consulting firm.

But Scherf concedes that time-to-market alone doesn't determine a winning strategy in the burgeoning WLAN market. Perhaps of greater importance is a new product's ability to co-exist with present technology. For example, in his own testing, Scherf had difficulties with interoperability between Lucent and Cisco gear.

"I'm still not entirely convinced that it's a consumer friendly solution in terms of bringing in home and hooking it up and having it work right away...even though the products have a Wi-Fi certification, there are some manufacturers that require the products to be purchased from one vendor," Scherf added during a telephone interview.

From the article "TI Builds on 802.11b Market with New Chipset," by Bob Liu.

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