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Rumor: Broadcom Phasing Out Wi-Fi Chip Business (digitimes.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the allocating-resources dept.

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.

7 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Yay! by klingens · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Yay! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You sound like someone who's never had to deal with the utter mess that bcmwl driver was.

    2. Re:Yay! by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      Be careful what you wish for. Broadcom is not the worst offender anymore.

    3. Re:Yay! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Exactly. I am surprised the rejoicing was not louder. Many good routers start using other SoC packages and "save BOM cost" by switching to Broadcom WiFi. Then suddenly folks are getting the devices and are unable to load working Open Source firmware.

      I will not miss Broadcom at all.

    4. Re: Yay! by the_humeister · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The strangest thing: Raspberry Pi uses a Broadcom SoC for all 3 versions, and everything is open source. When I heard they were going to use Broadcom for their device and have open source drivers for everything, needless to say, I was skeptical. And yet they delivered, even with the GPU.

    5. Re:Yay! by r1348 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, I did rejoice when they announced their brcmfmac ans brcmsmac drivers, except that the latter was then basically abandoned, with new hardware support never being added apart from the limited initial offering, and that's the driver supposed to cover their laptop chips!
      So yeah, it's Intel or Atheros/Qualcomm for me right now. Realtek has general good linux support, but their chips cover only the lower end of the market. Mediatek is what was once known as Ralink, their support used to be good, I wonder how it is now. Any other current vendors I did not mention?

    6. Re: Yay! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That is not true, some guy rewrote everything from scratch and Broadcom hired him. Broadcom only released the specs.

      Basically broadcom didn't have the ability to release the open source code before (who knows why but it is probably not good). Aswell they didn't have the trust or ability (we don't know which) to hire someone to rewrite them.

      Some guy took his own time, started rewriting the thing and showed that it was possible... then they bought him up and we don't really know what that means because he could be missing parts.

      Here's a talk by the guy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXDeketJNdk