The era of the loaded laptop is upon us, and what the laptop increasingly will be loaded with is broadband access chips, cards, antennas, ports and interface software.

Most new laptop PCs already are outfitted with native Ethernet and dial-up ports, sometimes in multiples, and more laptops are shipping every day with embedded Wi-Fi antennas or cards. Some laptops also have embedded 3G capability, though it remains to be seen how much penetration 3G will gain into this market. Looking to ease WiMAX onto this connectivity-happy real estate, a handful of semiconductor companies have been working to develop integrated Wi-Fi/WiMAX chipsets to be embedded in laptops over the next few years.

Although it's true that in some markets, WiMAX initially will be introduced as a backhaul option for Wi-Fi hotspots, the promise of WiMAX connectivity in laptops and the anticipated deployment of WiMAX as a next-generation broadband access method by service providers such as Clearwire and Sprint is leading the industry to believe that WiMAX will be available to a large number of end users within the next two or three years.

“Wi-Fi and WiMAX are both supple technologies, and they can be integrated,” said Jim Hueser, business unit executive for wireless solutions sales for IBM, during an executive roundtable at the WiMAX World Conference and Expo in Boston this month. Hueser said IBM has been working with Alvarion and Cisco Systems to deploy large-scale wireless mesh networks to address public-safety and government applications in multiple county regions. The companies are using shared Wi-Fi/WiMAX infrastructure “because of the scalability issue,” he said. “Doing a mesh that large with just Wi-Fi is simply too costly. WiMAX eventually will be on the access side of the network, especially in environments of coverage where you have different densities of population.”

Tom Tofigh, principal member of the architecture technical staff at AT&T Labs Research, said during the same roundtable that AT&T “is looking forward to seeing chipsets being integrated” with Wi-Fi and WiMAX technology.

“Wi-Fi and WiMAX seem largely complementary at this stage, and there will be room for both services in the future,” added Lee Gopadze, vice president of wireless for Covad Communications.

Integration at the chipset level is generally seen as helping the spread and usage of WiMAX overall. WiMAX proponents like Ron Resnick, chairman and president of the WiMAX Forum, say integration will allow the technology to launch less expensively. “By 2008, there will be 84 million laptops shipping, and almost 100% of them will have Wi-Fi chips,” said Resnick, who also works for Intel. “Integrating that WiMAX and Wi-Fi capability on the same chip will only make it cheaper and easier to roll out.”

Meanwhile, Wi-Fi backers like Frank Hanzlik, managing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, preach the value of bringing end users a multitude of options and letting them make their own broadband choices. “There will be different environments and different situations that dictate the type of technology that will be used,” Hanzlik said.

However, presenting all of those connectivity options — not just Wi-Fi and WiMAX, but 3G and other broadband access connections — on the same laptop also carries the challenge not to confuse end users. “Customers will have a lot of choices,” said Scott Richardson, vice president of the mobility group and general manager of the service provider business group for Intel. “What the industry needs to work on is the transparency of the presentation. We need to focus on maintaining the simplicity of the user interface.”