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| Mobile WiMAX: star turn or sideshow? |
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| Thursday, 15 March 2007 | |
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According to many observers of, and participants in, the global wireless industry, 2007 will be the year that the mobile version of Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), aka IEEE 802.16e-2005, will begin to enter the commercial mainstream. This is certainly the prediction of Motorola, one of a group of pro-mobile WiMAX vendors that includes Alcatel/Lucent, Intel, Nokia, Nortel, Qualcomm, Samsung and Siemens. Analysts such as Godfrey Chua, IDC analyst and author of the ‘Worldwide WiMAX Infrastructure 2006-2011 Forecast’ report, concur. “Technology and market acceptance of WiMAX is underway in key pockets of the globe,” notes Chua. “We expect WiMAX infrastructure spending to be one of the fastest growing within the wireless segment. Spending will be propelled to US$3.59 billion by 2011, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 31 per cent.” And also, presumably, expecting great things of the technology are operators as diverse as Wateen Telecom and Sprint Nextel; in early summer 2006 the former tapped Motorola as the main supplier of a nationwide mobile WiMAX network in Pakistan, while last August Sprint said it would spend an initial US$1 billion this year on building out 802.16e infrastructure in the USA. Not everyone, however, is convinced that 2007 will be mobile WiMAX’s annus mirabilis. Citing, inter alia, competition from and extant investment in rival wireless technologies, potential problems with IPR, and lack of suitable frequencies in some locations, other individuals and corporations reason that 802.16e’s entry into the big time could be years away. Indeed, some see it only ever being a minority sport. Accentuating the positive Notwithstanding the nay sayers, the mobile WiMAX community has notched up some pretty impressive achievements over the course of the last two years, with the pace of developments seeming to step up a gear in 2006. Following the IEEE’s formal ratification of the mobile WiMAX 802.16e-2005 standard in late 2005, fixed WiMAX Forum certified products have started to be deployed in the marketplace and certification of 802.16e is scheduled for Q1 2007. For their part chipset manufacturers have announced or introduced silicon that will support mobile WiMAX functionality in devices and customer premises equipment (CPE). At the same time the number of actual and potential 802.16e service providers is building quite nicely. As well as the Wateen deployment and the Sprint initiative referenced above, and commercial launches by KT Telecom and SK Telecom of the Korean WiBro version of the technology, the list of organisations reportedly experimenting with, trialling or planning mobile WiMAX/WiBro networks is extended and extending. A non-exhaustive version of this list would include: Chunghwa Telecom; Beijing Airway Communications; BellSouth; Globalcom Data Services in the Lebanon; the Japanese Government; KDDI; NTT DoCoMo; Venezuelan operator Omnivision; the Softbank Group; Telecom Italia; Canada’s TR Labs; and Brazil ’s TVA. In fact, in a webinar conducted in January 2007, Pyramid Research revealed that 80 per cent of operators it had surveyed from mature markets, and 78 per cent from emerging markets, had said that they had considered investing in WiMAX. Motorola itself reports that at December 2006 it had more than 20 802.16e mobile WiMAX trials underway around the world. “When we look back one year ago and reflect on all that the industry has accomplished, it is truly astounding the pace at which next generation broadband solutions are evolving. WiMAX no longer is just a promise, a potential. Now it’s here, it’s real, and Motorola is at the forefront of delivering this technology,” states Dan Coombes, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Motorola Networks & Enterprise. Why the buzz? Advocates of mobile WiMAX/WiBro can claim a number of compelling benefits for the technology. One is the high bandwidth it can support, relative to the modest bandwidth actually delivered by initial 3G systems. The WiMAX Forum, for example, says that portable WiMAX systems can be expected to deliver capacity of up to 40 Mbits/s per channel while mobile systems are expected to provide up to 15 Mbits/s of capacity within a typical cell radius deployment of up to 3 km. Another positive for WiMAX in general is the cost of the spectrum, again relative to 3G and the mountains of cash paid for 3G spectrum by some operators. In the judgment of a recent Analyst Insight from Pyramid Research, activity worldwide suggests that WiMAX spectrum is substantially cheaper than 3G, and can be had for as little US$0.01 per MHz per person in some markets. Pre-figuring this, when announcing its WiMAX strategy last year Sprint stated: “The WiMAX technology to be deployed in the network is expected to offer a cost-per-Megabit and performance advantage that reflects a substantial improvement in the comparable costs for the current 3G mobile broadband offerings.” WiMAX is pretty versatile too, with operators able to offer fixed and portable services, as well as mobile ones, on the same infrastructure. “Ultimately the more applications and content that an operator is able to layer on its network, the more valuable the network is,” observes Pyramid Research senior analyst and webinar host Ozgur Aytar. A fourth advantage of mobile WiMAX is that it is more IP-friendly than 3G. According to the WiMAX Forum its IP-based architecture includes IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) support to facilitate a low-cost rapid roll out of new applications. The flip side That’s some of the good news about mobile WiMAX. As you might anticipate, there’s some less positive assessments of the potential of mobile WiMAX around too. As has been noted by numerous experts, vanilla 3G may not be capable of delivering the sort of bandwidth its progenitors forecast, but its commercialisation is much more advanced than is that of WiMAX. Not everyone is quite so sure that mobile WiMAX will adhere to the standardisation timetable envisaged by its more enthusiastic supporters. In its DecisionNote ‘When Will WiMAX Become a Reality?’ for example, Yankee Group reckons that standardised mobile WiMAX will not become a reality until early 2008, and even then there will need to be substantial progress in the specs-making arena. “While the WiMAX standards process has led to much frustration in the industry, the standard is essential to the market success for the technology,” ventures Tara Howard, Yankee Group, Broadband Access Technologies analyst. “Standards are critical for ensuring vendor interoperability and certifying devices. Therefore, it is also important to educate service providers and potential customers on the actual timeline for standardised products to help avoid a burnout.” Experts also detect residual holes in the repertoire of mobile WiMAX. One concerns its security. According to a new ABI Research brief, and contrary to many users’ expectations, WiMAX does have a number of security vulnerabilities. “They say that if you don’t learn from the past, you are doomed to repeat it,” comments ABI Research vice president Stan Schatt. “Early Wi-Fi consumers enjoyed a false sense of security until there were some well-publicised hacking exploits. The WiMAX Forum has emphasised how much more secure WiMAX is than early Wi-Fi. As a result, there may be WiMAX customers who are similarly lulled into a false sense of security.” The flaws, says Schatt, should begin to show themselves once the first big WiMAX rollouts occur. Again, given that mobile WiMAX is as yet embryonic its economic viability could be determined by something as fundamental as the Intellectual Property Right (IPR) fees levied on the vendor community. According to Aytar, author of Pyramid Research’s report ‘Can WiMAX Challenge 3G? Performance, Economics, and Opportunities’, a plausible case could be made for mobile WiMAX adoption if the sums work out. However, Aytar doesn’t believe that WiMAX will be cheaper than 3G on the CapEx front, and while mobile WiMAX has lower OpEx potential, this could be negated by 3G’s earlier scale advantages. “It surely lacks the 3G economies of scale, at least that is initially, and will not provide the geographic footprint that 3G already has,” she told the January webinar audience. Pyramid believes the level of IPR fees could be critical here. The company notes that while the mobile industry norm for IPR ‘tax’ is 2 pre cent to 5 per cent, WCDMA phones typically run at 10 per cent to 15 per cent and, if the vendor has no patents, can reach 25 per cent. Pyramid points out that the WiMAX community hopes to keep WiMAX IPR costs close to 0 per cent of equipment costs, and that over one third of operators canvassed for its report said that they expected WiMAX fees to be lower than HSPA/LTE and CDMA/EVDO. However, recalls Pyramid, the mobile industry had similar hopes for an ‘IPR-lite’ W-CDMA technology back in its development days. The company remarks that a potential impediment to achieving a less onerous IPR model is non-WiMAX Forum member Qualcomm, which acquired considerable OFDM/OFDMA IPR with the purchase of Flarion in 2005. Nor is 3G standing still. The Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) describes High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) as offering typical user data speeds in the range of 0.8 to 3.6 Mbits/s, while last year Nortel and Qualcomm successfully achieved what was claimed to be the industry's first 7.2 Mbits/s HSDPA mobile data calls. HSDPA is also getting well established. Data from the GSA published in January 2007 had 140 HSDPA networks in various stages of deployment in 64 countries, of which 93 had commercially launched in 51 countries. And this is to say nothing of the potential competition from faster-than-3G technologies such as High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA), Super 3G or 3G Long Term Evolution (LTE), or the alternatives from the CDMA community such as CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Rev A, 1xEV-DO Rev B and 1xEV-DO Rev C. So will mobile WiMAX be a major player in future wireless markets or simply be confined to bit part status. Unfortunately the jury’s still out at this stage of the game. It’s worth observing, though, that there doesn’t have to be an ‘either/or’ relationship with other types of wireless solution. The WiMAX Forum believes that WiMAX IEEE 802.16e-2005 will not compete with 2G or 3G, but will rather interwork with and complement those technologies, adding increased bandwidth for data applications to the extended coverage offered by cellular. Interestingly, in December SK Telecom contracted InterDigital Communications Corporation to develop a mobility solution for nationwide session continuity, supporting nationwide handover for users moving between WiBro and UMTS networks throughout South Korea. |
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