Intel Looks to Drive Internet Mobility

VON.x keynote speaker, Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group, said the Internet is in spiral mode, but unlike the current financial markets, this spiral is a positive sign.

Like the software spiral (which others call Moore’s Law) that saw a doubling of processing power every 18 months thanks to new chip technology, Chandrasekher said the Internet itself is in a spiral that finds bandwidth utilization increasing at the same rate. Unfortunately, to reach its potential the Internet must become truly mobile, and today all the newest applications driving Internet usage is happening on the PC, not the mobile device.

“Clearly there is a lot of opportunity here,” Chandrasekher said, citing the 32 hours a week users spend online and the 140 new applications that appear on Facebook every day and the 3 billion minutes a day spent on social networking overall. “The biggest generator of traffic on the Internet, porn, was finally overtaken by social networking he said.”

However, “It is not happening on handheld devices; it is happening on [broadband] networks and PCs. This is not being mobilized,” he said.

He said the Holy Grail that will unleash the Internet is putting it in your pocket.

With applications such as Second Life consuming approximately 50 percent of CPU utilization and streaming video eating up so much processing power, putting full Internet capability in consumers’ pockets will take continued innovation.

And it isn’t just about consumer demand. Chandrasekher said there also are economics behind doing so. He said for instance that messaging accounts for 37 percent of time spent on the Internet but only 21 percent of traffic. By contrast, browsing accounts for 8 percent of the time spent on the Internet, but 52 percent of the traffic. As more browsing is done from mobile devices the performance of the network and end user devices erodes and new technology is needed.

Chandrasekher said 88 percent of users in Japan who use cell phones for Internet applications are dissatisfied. To this end, Intel will focus its development efforts to address three issues with handheld Internet usage: performance, compatibility and broadband wireless.

Intel’s roadmap for 2008 and beyond includes three new chip technologies that reduces power by factors of 10 and reduced footprint significantly. “It will enable out entry into a really small form factor design,” Chandrasekher said and showed prototypes of full service wireless PCs the size of a credit card.

“We think that’s pretty neat. When you start to do that, it unleashes the imagination of the software world,” he said.

And unleashing the wireless network to support this, will be WiMAX, he said.