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We hear a great deal about how wireless will become embedded in every device we use and even into industrial machines and perhaps our bodies themselves. The operators see a chance for new revenue streams for their networks, but there is still a lot of work to be done to shrink IP wireless technology down - in terms of size, cost and power - to achieve this nirvana. Motorola, struggling in the conventional handset space, has decided to take on the challenge, and is announcing a new business in wireless broadband modules that will go into a wide range of consumer electronics devices and eventually monitoring machines or sensor systems.

Planning to use HSPA, WiMAX or LTE, Motorola will put technology that was once reserved for its own cellphones into modules that ODMS and OEMs can then embed in products - a model more closely associated with Taiwan than top five phonemakers, although the Chinese manufacturers like Huawei are helping to change that too. Early target products would be netbooks - already rather crowded perhaps - smart grid devices and media players, with monitoring or M2M technologies perhaps on the radar for the future.

The move, pre-announced by CNET yesterday, could play to Motorola's strengths, allowing it to broaden the base for its always well-respected technology, without the cost and complexity of negotiating carrier deals and doing expensive consumer launches. However, this is also a business that requires excellent cost efficiencies and supply chain logistics, which has not always been Motorola's winning hand on the devices side. But as Ericsson has shown in laptop modules, flexibility to adopt an unfamiliar set of partnerships - pushing core technology but outsourcing everything else - can reap dividends for the most traditional vendor. The move could also reflect the influence of the head of Motorola's handset arm, Sanjay Jha, who with his long career at fabless chipmaker Qualcomm knows all about embedding wireless into devices, and the manufacturing and distribution partnerships that need to be negotiated to do this.

Gary Koerper, VP of engine systems for Motorola Mobile Devices, told CNET: "In the next five to seven years everything you own will be connected to the internet." However, while Motorola has cut back on the number of handset launches and platforms it will support in 2009-2010, Koerper insisted this new move was supplementary, not a total change of focus. "The core of Motorola's wireless devices business is still cellphones," he said. "We are still focused on smartphones and Android handsets to drive that market going forward." He added: "I think it's the culmination of our quiet investment in the things we have already been doing in wireless along with a need in the consumer electronics and machine-to-machine markets for wireless broadband access coming together to create this big opportunity for us."

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