Intel lab not afraid of a few standards scuffles

Intel Architecture Labs spends time pushing standards, mediating between warring camps.

By Sandra Gittlen
Network World, 05/03/99

HILLSBORO, ORE. - When Tony Salvador needed fresh ideas for Intel Architecture Labs researchers, he went to Alaska to check out the canneries.

Salvador is an ethnographer, someone who studies how people benefit from new technologies. He says the canneries had shied away from technology because of the tough conditions in which they work, namely the wet and fishy docks and boats. But in studying the transactions among the fishermen, tenders (or middlemen) and canneries, Salvado spotted a market for new waterproof wireless tools.

The process of delivering fresh catches to the canneries has three steps. First, fishermen catch the fish and hand them over to tenders who work the docks. The tenders then log the catches, giving the fishermen receipts for the fish. Tenders also send copies of those receipts and related paperwork to the government fishery agencies. Finally, the tenders transfer the fish to the cannery, again logging the transaction with the government.

Salvador told his team at Intel Labs' Jones Farm facility here that waterproof wireless tools would be a big help for the tenders, who often hand fishermen soggy receipts and send the government soiled forms.

With wireless tools, tenders could hop onboard boats, quickly input catches, print out a receipt and, at the same time, e-mail or fax a copy of a preprogrammed form to federal agencies. They could also merge their catch information with that of the canneries. All that information would be stored on a server so that tenders, canneries or even fishermen could access the data later.

Site visits like the one Salvador made to the Alaskan canneries are important for Intel Architecture Labs, one of seven research labs operating under Intel's $70 million research effort. Information gathered by ethnographers is turned over to other company researchers, who decide what ideas have the most merit. The cannery visit not only helped Intel find a new market for wireless tools but also demonstrated the need for wireless standards and technologies.

Intel Architecture Labs, established in 1991 and led by Director Craig Kinnie, develops advanced technologies, such as videoconferencing, and creates industry standards upon which others build products. Unlike other corporate research labs, Kinnie says more than 90% of Intel's work ends up in Intel products, as well as the wares of Intel's partners. Most other corporate labs report around 25% of research ending up in products, Kinnie claims.

Cable vs. DSL

Some of the hottest standards work at Intel's labs centers on broadband and IP telephony.

One of the biggest pushes this year from Intel Architecture Labs is for the wide deployment of broadband. Instead of backing cable or digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies, Intel is supporting both efforts. Kinnie says better broadband will lead to a better demonstration of what the Pentium III can do, such as downloading video or showing off 3-D images. This will ultimately help sell chips.

When the company entered the broadband arena last year, DSL and cable were essentially without standards.

Intel researchers worried that a lack of standardization was hurting the broadband industry, and, therefore, would slow the adoption of the Pentium III and future chips.

On one side were DSL vendors that moved at "glacial speeds," says Abel Weinrib, a director at Intel Architecture Labs. On the other side were cable vendors, who were "a bunch of cowboys," says Kevin Kahn, also a labs director.

"We waded in and told [the cable and DSL vendors] that none of us are going to make any money unless we cooperate," Weinrib says.

The goal for the team was to drive through standards for both cable and DSL. That way, standardized modems could be built into computers so DSL and cable installations could become plug and play. Today's DSL installments take more than four hours to complete, which limits customers.

At first, the cable and DSL camps were leery of Intel's involvement because the company didn't have a direct stake in either market. But Intel researchers proved themselves by developing working groups to deal with standards. Researchers now belong to the Universal ADSL Working Group, which proposed a DSL specification that led to the G.Lite standard. The standard is pending final approval in June by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The researchers also are part of the cable industry's Data Over Cable System Interface Specification effort to define how cable modems are constructed and will interoperate. In both cases, Intel helped write the standards and create reference designs for the technologies. Intel also developed the Universal Serial Bus technology, which will let users install DSL and cable without using Ethernet network cards.

Voice vs. data vendors

Intel is also playing both sides of the street when it comes to voice and data convergence. Intel is helping voice equipment vendors get data onto their lines and data vendors get voice into their pipes.

"The telephony vendors are under siege, and they have to defend their territory," says Reinier Tuinzing, a director in the Network Communications Group, an Intel product group that works closely with the labs.

Intel Architecture Labs is working with vendors such as Fujitsu, Nokia and Nortel Networks to reduce their 10-year product cycles. Researchers say the best way for these telephony equipment providers to compete is to let go of their proprietary technologies. By using off-the-shelf, standards-based technologies from Intel, Microsoft, Novell and other vendors, telephony equipment companies will be able to cut product cycles dramatically.

Intel is also helping them determine what building blocks they'll need to meld voice and data quickly. The firm already has two building blocks: the Intel VideoPhone and NetMeeting software. These videoconferencing products lay the groundwork for advanced converged communications.

Both products support H.323, the ITU conferencing standard on which many telco equipment providers have already standardized. While efforts are underway in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to develop a protocol that is geared more toward the Internet, Intel researchers, who co-authored H.323, say H.323 is more mature and just needs to be tweaked for security, billing and more sophisticated addressing.

Meanwhile, Intel says the data vendors have to realize that convergence is more than just throwing voice and data on the same line. There has to be the same level of quality and features that users get with today's voice calls.

To guarantee quality, researchers are hard at work on traffic management. Intel is working with software vendors to develop policy-based management tools. Policies are rules that dictate priority, quality of service and access for network traffic. With protocol drafts in the IETF and Desktop Management Task Force, Intel is chairing both standards efforts.

Intel hopes to license its policy technology to all the big data players, including Cisco and Ascend. Intel Architecture Labs already has worked with Hewlett-Packard to add support for policies in HP OpenView 2.0 and other HP products. o