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Rumor: Broadcom Phasing Out Wi-Fi Chip Business (digitimes.com)
jones_supa writes: According to sources in Taiwan at the heart of the electronics industry, Broadcom is looking to phase out its Wi-Fi chip business in a move to streamline its workforce and product offerings following its acquisition by Avago Technologies. In general, the Wi-Fi chip business yields relatively low gross margins compared to other product lines due to fierce price competition in the market for mass-market applications (such as notebooks, tablets, TVs and smartphones). Companies such as MediaTek, Realtek Semiconductor and RDA Microelectronics have already received a pull-in of short lead-time orders from Broadcom's customers in the Wi-Fi sector. Following its merger with Avago, Broadcom is expected to allocate more RD resources to solutions in the fiber-optic and server sectors. In addition, Broadcom has almost halved the workforce stationed at its office in Taipei.
Let's hope this rumour is right. One less shitty vendor with shitty WLAN chips. Then Apple and Dell have to look elswhere to fsck over their customers with crappy hardware without working (Linux) drivers.
I went through this with Avago's last acquisition. If there is any division within Broadcom/Avago that cannot meet 50% GM it will be cut/sold.
Investing in the future is only done if it also has returns now. The whole idea behind Avago is to pull the money out of existing products. R&D is primarily support. For new product lines they buy the market winners and repeat the process.
It sounds like wifi does not return enough and the money would be better used buying some other company. I expect this acquisition is also bad news for r-pi as the CEO thinks IOT is not worth investing in.
A supposed news piece that starts with "rumor?" I naïvely hoped it was a piece of information about how that kind of rumor spreads, but no. Journalism is dead, at least here.
There's nothing like $HOME
Posting anonymous because reasons. Read the play-by-play of what has happened with this acquisition here: https://www.thelayoff.com/broa... This is what is going one as confirmed from inside. If you don't make your margins you're fucked. God speed to all of us still there....
Guess what happens when consumer routers stop having Broadcom chips in them...
TVs do not need WiFi chipsets.
Two stories about people not using wifi.
I know a guy that claims to get headaches not just from any wireless source, but from any electromagnetic source. He won't use a cell phone, cordless phone, wifi and doesn't even like standing next to a PC... but a Mac is fine.
Second, the company I work for moved offices recently. In our new office, 2.4GHz wireless is so slow because of all the access points in the area. We're moving back to wires in the office as a result.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
Oh, I know there are plenty that do. I'm saying that they don't *need* to.
Sarcasm?
Cables declined because normal people don't run coax or twisted pair to every room in their house.
If Broadcom WiFi chipsets and their other consumer product lines are going away, it's really bad news for several key Maker community and OSS platforms. And decent alternatives are dropping off as well. Now, Broadcom was famous for being nearly impossible to work with, for smaller companies - no documentation, no support, no parts availability. And this was by design, that they would only work with 'tier one' customers. Raspberry Pi happened because it was developed by Broadcom folks in UK in their spare time, using a Broadcom set-top-box chipset. The talented Pi team just designed into the latest model 3 a BCM4343(43438), which looks good on paper and even includes BT. But will it, and the main CPU BCM2837, be around in two years? The Electric Imp and spark.io (now Particle) Photon WiFi modules are based on the Broadcom WICED environment. The WRT community grew around Atheros and Ralink chipsets, sporting Linux on MIPS32. Atheros now belongs to Qualcomm, which has been struggling and had layoffs. Ralink was bought by Mediatek, and WiFi is far from their core business. Atmel (think Arduino) came out with an interesting WiFi module, ATSAMW25 that includes a programmable ARM. And now Microchip, the purveyor of the kludgy PIC processor, is buying Atmel.