MetaLink Chipset: Great Performance, Poor Marketing

With Atheros, Broadcom, and Intel dominating the client and access point Wi-Fi chipset market, it should come as no surprise that chipset manufacturer MetaLink felt that it had to resort to Tolly Group tests to offer some external validation of the throughput and coverage that its WLANPlus chipset line offers. The test results plainly demonstrated significant performance advantages over competing products that use Atheros, Broadcom, and Marvell chipsets. What's not clear is who MetaLink is marketing to: the Tolly Group usually provides testing services for business-focused vendors, but the news release and testing report speaks specifically about home networking.

The reality is that consumers don't buy their products based on Tolly Group reports, and they're even much less concerned about what chipsets those Wi-Fi products contain. MetaLink will not gain any consumer brand recognition through publicity efforts like this and their OEM prospects are unlikely to be significantly swayed by Tolly Group reports or the accompanying press releases. MetaLink surely didn't earn brownie points with Apple, Buffalo, or Linksys by demonstrating how the Wi-Fi access points from these three big name vendors performed poorly against MetaLink'sreference design AP. MetaLink would be better off working the biz-dev angle behind the scenes with the SOHO Wi-Fi vendors and continue obtaining Wi-Fi certification for their products.