MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS
WiMAX _ it's here and it's now
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
16-04-2008
WiMAX is here, WiMAX is now and WiMAX will soon be in everything from notebook PCs, gaming consoles and cameras to media gateways connecting devices all over the world, according to Motorola, which also thinks that providing broadband access through 3G HSDPA technology would be impossibly expensive.
Motorola's senior director for operations and marketing, home and networks mobility Mike Ropicky said that the world now had a demand for high bandwidth, low-latency instant connections to meet the demand that users had for social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube.
The traffic on the video sharing web site YouTube in a single day today is more than that of the entire Internet in 2000. "Music downloads, watching TV on your device - in five years from today it will be quite pervasive," he said.
The other message is that WiMAX is a worldwide standard, unlike GSM, which came out of Europe, and is an extremely versatile standard applicable for different operators and different business models with equipment coming out on 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz, 3.5GHz and 3.3GHz in some countries.
Today Motorola is already rolling out its 19th commercial WiMAX network and is actively engaged in 77 further contracts in 44 countries. In Thailand, Motorola is the partner for UIH's trial licence in Bangkok and Phuket.
"We look forward to Thailand opening up the spectrum from trial to commercial. That will make for radical change. Today, broadband penetration is less than two per cent. Penetration could be six to seven per cent by 2011 and WiMAX will be one of the enablers that gives Thai people connectivity to the Internet," he said. Motorola sees very different WiMAX roll-out scenarios depending on the nature of each market. In Pakistan, Wateem Telecom has rolled out WiMAX into a market with virtually no copper broadband infrastructure. "There was an immediate 160 per cent growth in broadband penetration. It went from people having no service at all to people having broadband and changing their lives." In India, the killer app is still voice and the operators there are looking to WiMAX to offload data traffic from their 2G networks and free up capacity so they can add more voice users.
In Germany, a energy utility company, NeckarColm used WiMAX to enter the broadband market. Germany saw WiMAX as a way to get new entrants into the wireless broadband business.
In the US, Sprint has taken WiMAX and used it to deliver broadband to the person, rather than to the house or office. Sprint wants broadband to be personal and individualised and delivers it to the person who can take it with them.
For Thailand, the vision is somewhere in the middle, both for extending broadband access to the person as well as covering large swathes of the country where wired infrastructure is insufficient.
The issue of licensing is also a contentious one. In Malaysia, regulators decided to give WiMAX licences out only to new players. Motorola deputy general manager for Thailand Dr Chawapol Jariyawiroj warned that whatever licencing methodology the new regulator takes, there would be people who disagreed.
Asked about the amount of spectrum needed to run a network, Ropicky said that a 30MHz allocation would be a "good number."
On the technical side, WiMAX can show speeds of 25 to 100Mbps, though that is highly dependent on the link quality and distance to the base station as well as the business model of the operator. Theoretically, WiMAX can give a peak of 3.5bps per hertz of spectrum. In real life, a sustained figure of 2.5bps per hertz is realistic. A carrier of 10MHz means 25Mbps. Each cellsite typically has four antennae, which equates to 100Mbps per cell.
The modulation technology used both by WiMAX and LTE, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (ODFM), yields much higher efficiencies than the technology used in 3G which gives 0.8 bits per hertz. This means that a lot more can be done with the same amount of spectrum.
Asked how WiMAX compared to 3G, Ropicky said that today 3G could hit 14.4Mbps and HSPA+ could hit 30 to 40Mbps, but the standards were still not finalised. Beyond 3G, LTE (long term evolution) promises speeds of 170Mbps on a 20MHz carrier.
"The question is where WiMAX fits. Today you have 20 to 25Mbps, better than what you get on HSDPA networks. The key thing is cost, if you are going to deliver high bandwidth through HSDPA, the costs involved will be huge. On the one hand, you have the licence, and then you have the backhaul. Most 3G networks are relying on a 2Mbps link. That means you will need 10 2Mbps links to each site to provide 20Mbps. How much will that cost you? Lower-cost broadband through HSDPA 3G is impossible," he said.
Ropicky thinks that operators are still feeling the pain of the 3G spectrum auctions that have resulted in a sky-high concession fees in many countries. The way WiMAX is going to be regulated is going to be the main differentiator and he sees a trend for regulators to charge less for WiMAX licenses than for 3G because of the lessons learned.
He noted that not every 2G operator needed to go the 3G route. Some might opt for Evolved EDGE and then jump to 4G LTE or WiMAX. Motorola continued to make investments in 2G, 3G, LTE as well as WiMAX, he stressed.
