News & Analysis
Bleak prospects seen for mobile WiMax
John Walko
6/23/2008 6:50 AM EDT
According to Frost & Sullivan, unless spectrum auctions and commercial mobile WiMax rollouts (compliant to Wave 2 Phase 2 certification) gather momentum before the end of this year, the market scope for the broadband wireless technology "will be insignificant."
The researchers also suggest the technology is facing a range of challenges that are likely to make it unfeasible as a mobile "access" technology.
However, they sugar this bleak analysis by noting that the huge investment that has gone into mobile WiMax may not have been for nought. Frost & Sullivan believes that the work carried out on Mobile WiMax has the potential to spur new ventures, which could potentially lead Mobile WiMax to merge with 3G LTE.
"Recent events have been unfavourable toward Mobile WiMax," noted Frost & Sullivan Program Manager Luke Thomas. "For example, Sprint-Nextel recently announced a delay to the commercial roll-out of its Mobile WiMax service, Xohm, and has now stated that the first commercial service of Xohm will be in Baltimore in September 2008 followed by Washington DC and Chicago by Q4 2008 (provided the new WiMAX venture 'ClearWire' deal closes by Q4 2008)."
Thomas pointed out that any operator looking at Mobile WiMax has to consider the current environment in which 97 percent of laptops are shipped with Wi-Fi technology.
3G LTE is expected to be a fully ratified standard by the end of 2008 or beginning of 2009 with deployments slated to occur in late 2009 or first months of 2010 offering peak data rates of up to 170Mbps.
Thomas also said that the number of dual-mode Wi-Fi/Cellular mobile phones is also on the rise, with newer models emerging at lower costs, with better battery life. And he welcomes the fact that Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NEC, NextWave Wireless, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks and Sony Ericsson recently invited all interested parties to join an initiative to keep royalty levels for essential LTE patents in mobile devices below 10 percent of the retail price.
"It is still unclear if members of the WiMax Forum have reached an agreement pertaining to the intellectual property rights they possess for Mobile WiMax. Hence, prominent members of the WiMax Forum have formed the Open Patent Alliance (OPA) to address this very issue," said Thomas.
He adds that 2009 will be the year when operators begin to realize that mobile WiMAX can no more be considered as a feasible mobile broadband access technology. "In terms of indoor wireless broadband, Wi-Fi fits well in this space and with the emergence of 802.11n, which includes MIMO, throughputs would be far better than what Mobile WiMax can deliver. With respect to outdoor mobile broadband environments, users would expect Mobile WiMax to seamlessly hand off to cellular networks in the absence of WiMax reception. In reality this is not possible as mobile WiMax is not backward compatible with existing cellular technologies."
At a recent WiMax Forum workshop in Dubai, participants accepted that Mobile WiMax is not optimised to simultaneously handle both data and voice applications as efficiently as HSPA, or 3G LTE. It is therefore unclear whether the initial client devices for Mobile WiMax (Ultramobile PCs or tablet devices) will meet with any degree of consumer receptiveness.
"While the Nokia N810 tablet will retail at $440 for Xohm users later this year, it is still ambiguous if consumers will want one mobile device for voice, based on cellular technology and another for 'personal broadband' based on Mobile WiMax," said Thomas. This is especially relevant, considering that HSPA coupled with Wi-Fi can do both in a single mobile device.
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Comments
dmjossel
6/23/2008 8:55 AM EDT
This article, just like nearly every other WiMax-related statement from F&S, is sheer nonsense. Looks like they have been retained to make the business case for LTE, rather than actually look at what is going on.
LTE deployments next year? You have to be kidding me. The spec isn't even finished yet. No certifications have been begun. No interoperability tests have been performed. Real LTE infrastructure and devices are two years away at an absolute minimum.
The remark about IPR is pure FU. The formation of patent alliance is a good thing and should prevent royalties from becoming too high a percentage of device costs, as is the case with GSM, or keeping operators and manufacturers locked into a single chipset vendor, as is the case with CDMA. The remarks try to make as if it sound as if the necessity of such an alliance is a bad thing-- as if it didn't exist with other technologies.
WiMax must have Wave 2 rollouts this year or else it fails? That's convenient, since the Wave 2 certification was just finished a scant few weeks ago and the certified devices are only now hitting the market.
Dual mode WiFi/Cellular phones exist? Yes, they sure do. Does that spell doom for WiMax? I honestly don't see how. The presence of Wifi as a local network alternative to the WWAN has no impact on the fact that for broadband, WiMax makes a better WWAN than 2.5G regardless of the technology used, and better than 3G for many applications, and as good or better than LTE for some, which isn't even here yet.
WiMax Forum attendees agreed it is not optimized for simultaneous voice and data? What does that even mean for a technology that, unlike LTE, is built from the ground up to be packet-switched and offers multiple levels of QoS for any services you run on top of IP, including VOIP? Any operator for whom voice services are a factor are going to run an IMS solution (or any LTE operator, for that matter) and that means you have dynamic QoS. Not having to handle legacy circuit-switched networks is a bonus, not a fault-- and the last time I looked, most 2.5G networks were also not that great about handling simultaneous voice and data.
The use of MIMO in 802.11 is completely irrelevant. MIMO increases throughput, not coverage, and 802.11 is still a LAN technology not a WAN technology.
Seamless handoffs from cell to WiMax-- why would you need them? WiMax is targeted at greenfield operators, wired operators without wireless networks, operators who skipped 3G and want to offer broadband without waiting for LTE, or those who want to overlay a true wireless broadband network on top of their existing cellular infrastructure. In none of these scenarios is such call handoffs, from VOIP on WiMax to the voice bearer of GSM or CDMA, a real requirement. It's just another straw man set up to show how WiMax can't deliver.
Frost and Sullivan is doing a nice hatchet job on WiMax. Which LTE vendor is footing the bill?
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Jacomo
6/23/2008 1:56 PM EDT
DM you are dead on.
These folks have been eating Ericsons food on LTE.
The WiMAX technology is far superior to LTE as it relates to a Data Centric (IP) Broadband Wireless Network. WiMAX is not targetted at the Switched VOice Services like LTE must be-most of their revenues are in voice.
Real world deployment of a serious LTE network is really in the 2012-2013 time frame.
The only thing WiMAX is missing today is a solid 4G capable spectrum. 2.5Ghz is too limited for anything other then serious PTP fixed Broadband Wireless-where it will dominate.
The sooner they link up with their new partners (the MSO) and gain access to its AWS (1700 & 2100Mhz) spectrum the sooner they will be able to be competitive in the Rural and Suburban markets-Foliage will kill 2.5Ghz any Wireless Mobile services and force Clearwire to focus on urban canyons initially.
LTE will be wagged by the Voice segment at the expense of Data/Video.
Jim
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