WiMax
While WiMAX gets spectrum and certificates, it should not get totally carried away with the mobility pot-of-gold for now, says Caroline Gabriel.
Two landmark events for broadband wireless took place last week: the first WiMAX products were officially certified at last; and Qualcomm’s acquisition of Flarion was approved. The potential threat from a combined CDMA/Flarion platform in the mobile broadband world, and the countdown to the 802.16e standard, are shining the spotlight firmly on mobility issues, somewhat overshadowing the belated announcement of fully certified fixed WiMAX equipment.
Yet it is a mistake to get over obsessed with the mobile potential of WiMAX. Whatever the hype says, 802.16e will not be appearing in equipment that is mobile to the same degree as CDMA for at least two years, and until then Qualcomm and the Super3G communities will have the upper hand in markets where highly mobile use is the main priority. But even if WiMAX cannot play in the fully mobile arena until the next generation, last week’s WCA conference in San Jose, California, pointed to the very real short term potential that still exists for the technology in the nomadic, converged fixed/mobile and fixed access markets – and the very real technological and regulatory advances that are taking place to enhance that potential.
Unsurprisingly, the first vendors to brandish their official certificates were those that have been in the vanguard of the interoperability testing process since 802.16-2004 was ratified – Aperto and Redline on the equipment side, and the chipmakers Sequans and Wavesat, both of which have also recently showcased their forthcoming 802.16e products and announced significant alliances in Korea, home of the most important pre-WiMAX platform, Wi-Bro. The other companies that were prominent in early testing, Proxim and Airspan, have not yet achieved certification, nor, of course, has WiMAX’ svengali, Intel itself.
“The WiMAX era starts today,” said Ron Resnick, president of the WiMAX Forum, heralding the move towards off-the-shelf standards-based equipment with low prices. Already, the shift is away from vendors designing their own customer premises equipment (CPE) and moving towards commodity products from low cost manufacturers. So Redline, which has always specialized in backhaul and not made CPE, certified its RedMAX AN-100U base station and Aperto its PacketMAX 5000 base station. Sequans was also showing off a base station chip solution, the SQN2010, and only Wavesat, which has been most advanced in forming relationships with the Taiwanese ODMs for mass market consumer goods, offered a CPE for initial certification, the miniMAX platform.
The first wave of certification is more symbolic than truly significant to customers in terms of functionality. Only the air interface and the 3.5GHz profile are initially covered, with subsequent waves throughout 2006 addressing higher level capabilities such as quality of service, indoor CPE, other spectrum options and, eventually, portable and mobile operation for 802.16e. Interoperability and the promise of commodity silicon will be important, and signs of progress in those directions will reassure early WiMAX supporters, but customers at this stage will still be just as concerned with what is not standardized – the added value that the vendors put on top of their bare bones certifications.
Some suppliers, like Alvarion, have chosen not to seek certification at all until the second or third waves have been reached and they can adapt their whole architecture, including the more advanced features, to the standard. Others have entered the early wave but will compete on the basis of additional capabilities, for which they have already gained credibility in their proprietary bases.
Aperto is a good example of this, transferring well regarded differentiating technologies, notably in the corporate-class quality of service area, to its PacketMAX product. Aperto will now partner with two Taiwanese ODMs for its CPE, bringing unit cost down by 50% from day one compared to its proprietary PacketWave gear (to around $350 for its lower end Intel-based design. Another CPE based on the Fujitsu CPE chipset will follow from both ODMs). In a major statement of confidence that even a small WiMAX supplier can achieve volumes based on standardization, Aperto has signed up contract manufacturing giant Elcoteq to make its base stations. The equipment pricing implications of these strategies should help its customers, which are almost entirely service providers to enterprises, move into the consumer market, as flagship client TowerStream is planning to do in some US cities.
Despite all the sound and fury about mobility, the early certificate holders remain realistic. Both Redline and Aperto are firmly focused on achieving dominance in fixed WiMAX before moving on to other applications and believe 802.16e will initially be important to add nomadic options to fixed provider models, and combine laptop access with strong indoor penetration for converged services – rather than full mobility. 802.16e will be valuable for indoor installations in particular, says Aperto, but will take two years before it is certified and fully deployable.
So let’s stop calling 802.16e ‘mobile WiMAX’ and instead focus on the platform as a catalyst for convergence, combining powerful indoor penetration with laptop-based portability and commodity economics. This will, even without high mobility, make it an important technology for fixed, satellite and multi-network carriers as well as WISPs, and will give it a more important position in the telecoms patchwork than the currently emerging 802.16-2004 – although in its two-year window, this will support growth markets in developing economies, metrozones, backhaul and metro area WISPs that do not see mobile services as essential to their model.
Options opening up
For both standards, new spectrum options are opening up rapidly. Most exciting, though by no means a done deal, are moves by the US administration to provide more broadband wireless spectrum in various frequencies, including the 700MHz analog television band for which the WiMAX community has been lobbying hard – and in which Qualcomm already holds a national license for its MediaFLO mobile television network. Speaking at the WCA conference, Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary of commerce for communications, and administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), said the US plans to auction off separate 1.7GHz and 2.1GHz bands for WiMAX applications – although in reality, these are likely to be technology neutral, and so could be snapped up by supporters of other broadband technologies such as TD-CDMA or Flarion Flash-OFDM. By 2008, large parts of the 700MHz band should come up for auction.
The move is part of the Bush administration’s effort to stay “one or two steps ahead of other countries” and provide “universal, affordable access for broadband by 2007,” Gallagher said.
Another move with huge disruptive potential is the first by a western European regulator – Sweden’s PTS – to make part of the 3G expansion band around 2.5GHz technology neutral. The European Union is currently embroiled in a debate about whether these bands, at 2.5-2.69GHz, should be entirely earmarked for W-CDMA, the original plan, or whether part or all should be opened up to other technologies such as WiMAX, a stance supported by the UK, Sweden and others and opposed by Finland and France.
The European Commission had previously ruled that the 2.5-2.69GHz band should be “designated” for the UMTS 3G technologies – 2.5-2.57GHz for FDD uplink; 2.57-2.62GHz for TDD, some FDD downlink and guard bands; and the rest for FDD downlink only. But PTS interprets “designate” to mean that, if the market shows interest in another technology, the national government has the right to support technology neutrality in the band. The WiMAX Forum welcomed the PTS decision – which still has to be ratified by the Swedish government – as a boost to competition, but also called on regulators to allow TDD (time division duplex) within FDD (frequency division duplex) allocations as well. TDD-only allocations in the original 3G licenses have gone largely unused, although a few operators are trialling one of the main technologies for this area, the TDD version of UMTS, IPWireless-backed TD-CDMA. Graham MacDonald, secretary to the WiMAX Forum’s regulatory working group, said: “Sweden’s consultation is about the center gap between the TDD and FDD parts of the band. It’s a case of opening up the center gap, as no one is going to use it anyway.”
The PTS is currently struggling with the problem of encouraging 3G build-out in Sweden’s massive rural areas, which are hard for large carriers to justify economically. This is the main reason to consider broadband wireless networks in the 3G expansion band, since these can be more cost efficient in rural environments with their larger cells, and since the regulator has found that the issue of smaller, tech neutral licenses will attract smaller operators that are willing to work in rural regions. Therefore it plans to issue regional licenses in 2.5GHz, three for each Swedish commune or county. In its quest for rural coverage, PTS came close, last year, to allowing 3G license holders to use the 450MHz former analog mobile band for extending services more cheaply in sparsely populated districts, although eventually it decided to confine them to the 3G bands after all.
Other regulators that are likely to open up the 2.5-2.69GHz band in advance of any general EU decisions on technology neutrality are likely to be the UK’s Ofcom and Norway’s NTP.
The UK, which has been one of the most outspoken supporters of neutrality, will face lobbying from two of its largest companies – Vodafone for keeping the expansion bands exclusively for the 3G license holders, which paid so highly for their original investments; and BT, which would love to get its hands on a 2.5GHz license for portable and, eventually, mobile WiMAX. “Over 3GHz we’ve failed to make the business models work for competing with HSDPA but below 3GHz, services look viable,” said Dave Wisely, head of seamless access research and advisor to the BT board on spectrum purchases, in an interview. “We want the 3G expansion bands to be technology neutral because the more open the spectrum, the more competition it will bring to the market”, adding that it would “certainly be possible” that BT would bid (assuming it was allowed to do so, as the incumbent, by Ofcom. It probably would not face exclusion, since it has no mobile network and so can argue that it has less market dominance, in an increasingly mobile market, than Vodafone). BT has appointed Ryan Jarvis, who led the development of the innovative Fusion fixed/mobile convergence service, to create a WiMAX strategy and roll-out plan, even though Wisely believes 802.16e will not take off fully until 2011 in Europe, assuming the mobile spectrum is made available in 2007-8. BT has trialled WiMAX, mainly for rural access, in lightly licensed 5.8GHz but Wisely’s comments suggest it will not seek to acquire the 3.4GHz/3.5GHz licenses – which do not permit full mobility at this stage – currently held by UK Broadband and Pipex respectively. Pipex has trialled Airspan equipment and says it is technologically stable but the company is still working out the business cases.
Conventional spectrum
In more conventional WiMAX-suitable spectrum, there is also accelerating activity in Europe, with regulators in Germany, France and Switzerland planning to issue 3.5GHz licenses this year and Italy close behind. One attraction is that prices are generally low compared to those for 3G licenses (although Switzerland is setting a minimum of $3.8m that will deter smaller bidders). According to new research from Maravedis, the average price paid per Hz for WiMAX spectrum in 3.5GHz or 2.5GHz is 1,000 times lower than that paid for 3G spectrum so far (although that figure is likely skewed by the inflated fees western European operators paid in the late 1990s, which will certainly not be repeated when Europe allocated further mobile licenses). There have also been far larger numbers of WiMAX licenses awarded – 721 BWA/WiMAX awards compared to 106 3G licenses, according to Maravedis, which says there are now 394 holders in North America, 186 in Europe, 97 in Asia, and 49 in the Caribbean and Latin America region. Most of these, however, are regional – all of the US licenses and 78% of Europe’s.
In the end, regulatory policy will be more important in deciding WiMAX’ success than any other factor – certainly more so than delays in early stage certification or inevitable technical glitches. The year has started with many positive signs in this area, and now it is up to the WiMAX community not to get totally carried away with mobility, but to focus on how best to grasp these new opportunities and use them to establish 802.16 as a real world technology.
