Things you didn;t know about the Clearwire and Sprint "deal"...

The sun is shining today and i'm feeling lazy so I am just going to shamelessly quote from this post on MuniWireless.com.


"1) The new Clearwire network will use the “mobile” version of WiMax.
There seems to be a lot of confusion around this point, mainly because the “old” Clearwire had been using a so-called “fixed” version of the wireless broadband technology in the networks it’s been building since 2004. The new networks (including those inherited from Sprint’s Xohm operations) will use equipment based on the newer, mobile standard, which supports cellular-like roaming. Clearwire had previously said it was upgrading its networks to Mobile WiMax anyway, so this is not a big change. But when the mobile gear goes live, it will offer a much different experience than previous WiMax deployments.

2) Despite its stated strategic direction toward the long-term evolution (LTE) 4G cellular technology, AT&T currently runs several commercial WiMax networks in the U.S., in Nevada, Alaska and other locations.
Right now there doesn’t seem to be too much to look into here, except for the fact that AT&T may be hedging its bets by keeping its toes wet in matters WiMax. This may be more important in the future, when WiMax standards at the 700 MHz level emerge.

3) There is more bandwidth currently available at WiMax’s main frequency than at the much-heralded 700 MHz band.
This point is a hard one to make, since most people talk about the characteristics of specific spectrum slices, like the ability of 700 MHz signals to penetrate building walls. But when it comes to being able to offer more bandwidth to more folks, the amount of available spectrum may matter more — and right now, there is about 198 MHz available at WiMax’s 2.5 GHz band, as opposed to 60 MHz that is being freed up at 700 MHz. So WiMax may be better able to scale to support more users.

4) WiMax mobile devices are already under development, and should be ready about the same time the Clearwire network launches.
There’s a bit of a trust factor involved here, but we are going on the research we did with Sprint, who said that they had more devices in their labs for testing than they had time to certify. And the debut of Nokia’s WiMax tablet at CTIA in April seems to show that device manufacturers are ahead of the curve here.

5) The new Clearwire will offer day-pass and casual-use billing, which is a departure from the past long-term contracts.
Because Clearwire doesn’t have to subsidize the costs of all the expected WiMax-enabled devices, it can offer ad hoc contracts without the worry or expense of paying for end-user equipment. While it may take a while for Wall Street to wrap its mind around “occasional ARPU,” the incremental adds should bolster, not detract from, a provider’s bottom line."

These are all very interesting insights into the US Wimax market. Seeing that Google, Comcast, Intel and Time Warner Cable are the main investors in this deal it could mean that their collective push will finally bring Wimax into play as a real consumer technology. Calculating the usual delay of in these type of developments hitting Europe we could look at similar developments here in 2010 (-ish)...

Will Wi-Fi hot spots survive WiMax and 3G?

David Haskins writes a very good article on the "threath" of Wimax and 3G network to WiFi hotspots.
he makes a few very valid points:
- WiFi will still be the most common way to connect for the forseeable future. Accesible & affordable Wimax and 3G are still a long way away.
- WiFi client devices still outnumber and other form of access by far.
- Providers will most likely start offering bundles of wifi, cellular & wireline access.
- WiFi hotspot operators will have to start offering services in the future that will differentiate them from their competitors.

This last point is very significant. WiFi hotspots, by virtue of their localised coverage, lend themselves very well for location based services & advertising. A wifi hotspot can serve a user with information and offers directly relating to the users environment. If you're in a city center it can tell you where the nearest bus-stop is, where to go for a quick lunch, what business or social groups are meeting where and when (Open Coffee Club anyone) etc...
It can also "push" discount vouchers at a user through a captive portal.
There is lots of opportunities here and room in the market for all technologies as long as the market is approached with an open mind.

Wifi or Wimax (or both)?

Some followers of my blog and people that know me personally will have an idea on my position in the whole Wifi versus Wimax debate. As far as I am concerned there is no "versus" argument for the foreseeable future and the two technologies will compliment each other for quite some time.
Today I noticed a post on one of the many mailinglists (remember those you feed-junkies?) that I subscribe to. It was made by Cor van de Water a very knowledgeable guy who happens to work for Proxim. Cor's post concured with my opinion but added an extra bit of technical insight. Rather than quote from the post I have asked Cor for permission to post the whole message, so here it goes:

"Mr Cohen describes very accurately something that we also see
happening: Many customers come to us with the requirement for a WiMAX certified product, especially when they are working from a greenfield situation.
We then explain what our WiMAX certified products can do and check with the customer if this fits their needs.
The amazing thing that develops every time is that the customer starts explaining their needs and it appears that this absolutely does not fit with what WiMAX can offer.
For example, they want ubiquitous mobile high-speed wireless access. That is 3 acronyms that do not combine in WiMAX, while they are the core of standard WiFi.
WiMAX is either mobile (802.16e) but that variant of the standard is so much optimized for range that the throughput severely suffers and the ubiquitous availability is questionable, because this standard competes head-on with 3G style cellphone standards.
The 2004 variant (802.16d) can achieve a decent throughput, especially in the non-standard 7 MHz mode, but is not mobile and is also not ubiquitous.
The only ubiquitous mobile wireless de-facto standard is WiFi.
It is so much a standard, that when you buy a new laptop it is not mentioned as a feature, because *every* laptop has WiFi.

So, then the customers make the step that, yes, they want WiMAX still as backbone, but they want to add WiFi access to capture the market of ubiquitous available client devices.

Next stumbling blocks then appear: how about the availability of frequencies, licenses or unlicensed operation of the backhauls and the throughput requirements on the backhaul network.
Suddenly the customer realizes that none of their clients will be interested in which technology is used for the backhaul of their data, just like you don't care how the cell phone company feeds their towers, as long as you can use your phone.

So, in the contracts that we typically see with major customers we rarely see the work WiMAX back, except with a qualifier such as WiMAX-alike or pre-WiMAX.
We would like to sell our WiMAX gear to more customers, and we indeed see interest and sell to some customers, but they are a niche in our big wireless market and my personal opinion is that WiMAX signed its death certificate when it decided to focus the 802.16e variant so much on range, to allow it to be used for multimedia handsets in the same market segment that is targeted by so many cellphone technologies, which have the power of installed base and upgrade path.
WiMAX has gone the opposite direction of the rest of the wireless market, in search of higher throughputs.

Now look at how WiFi has finally decided to triple the air speeds without consuming more spectrum by putting the 802.11n stake in the ground and going for products.
The additional benefit of 802.11n will be the increased range, simply by smart switching between either higher throughput or using the additional bandwidth and antenna polarization for redundancy.
Indeed, with WiFi speeds now being higher than Fast Ethernet when AP and client benefit from 802.11n, we see that WiMAX is severely lacking in providing the bandwidth, where it started with an advantage by originally providing 256QAM modulation in the 802.16d version, so it is now unacceptable as backhaul.

To make an even stronger case for license-exempt products, with the addition of 255 MHz more bandwidth in the 5.4 GHz band and the regular approval of more radios by the FCC that allow a selection of any frequency in the 5.3, 5.4 or 5.8 GHz band, a whopping 480 MHz of spectrum is available for outdoor use in the USA, products are available today and plentiful, with high throughput, built-in mobility and competitive prices.

We see that once our customers understand the many orders of magnitude difference between WiFi and WiMAX installed base and they realize that the backhaul technology is unimportant as long as it provides high throughput, low latency and where applicable mobility, QoS and other WiMAX-alike features, we see that they always select a non-WiMAX solution for their access network and a WiMAX-alike solution for their backhaul.

I realize this may be controversial and painful for some, but I simply do not see the big market for WiMAX in the form it has now."

Nokia to release Wimax Internet tablet.

According to Techworld Nokia will release a new version of it's N800 Internet tablet next year. This version will include Wimax connectivity.
This is an interesting development and it follows on the heels of Intel's announcement that it has teamed up with three laptop manufacturers in order to integrate dual radio chipsets ("old" 802.11b/g 70mW & 802.16e 730mW) in laptops from Q1 2008 onwards.
It will be interesting to see if this increase in Wimax clients will do for Wimax what it did for WiFi when the Centrino chipset was introduced.

While everyone is talking about Wimax...

While everyone is talking about Wimax,Wifi seems to have quietly grown up.
I came across an interesting article in "the Ruckus room", Ruckus Wireles's corporate blog.
The blogpost give an insight on how WiFi has matured as a technology of choice in a market that we hear very little about. Service providers all over the globe (be in Internet service providers, Telco's or TV companies) are all looking at the tripple and quadruple play market. And seemingly they all have been looking at WiFi as a technology to distribute the service/signal around your home.
It maks sense; your ISP also wants to provide you with a phone service, IPTV, VOD etc.
Your phone company also wants more than a slice of the cake and your TV company most likely already has a cable into your house.
All they need is a way to distribute the signal around the house without the need for a rats-nest of cables and while allowing them to manage QoS and preferrably also allow them to manage the services in a transparent manner.

To quote from the post: "New technology is now letting operators not only integrate Wi-Fi but control things they haven't been able to control before. Things such as signal path selection, being able to see into the home RF spectrum, allocate different SSIDs for different services, prioritize traffic, monitor packet error rates, SNR, signal strength in different areas of the home. Blah, blah, blah."

It's interesting to see that a technology that grew from use in a LAN environment and that subsequently was adapted in long distance links and to cover large urban & rural areas has now gone full circle and is coming back into the home.

It also puts a different slant on the whole Wimax vs WiFi debate. While Wimax is full of great promises and is able to cover large distances and has a throughput that far exceeds WiFi, it is still best suited for backhaul applications. WiFi has been around much longer and has matured to such an extent that it has ensured it's place in the market for quite some time to come. Also looking at the millions of WiFi devices currently in use it would be lunacy to expect Wimax to capture this market....

E.

Radio gaga.....

"The last word" (a very popular radioshow in Ireland broadcasted by TodayFM) had scheduled a round table discussion on Broadband in Ireland. Participants were: Rex Combs, CEO of Eircom, John Doherty, ComReg Commissioner, Fran Rooney from Ice Broadband and Damien Mulley from IrelandOffline.
I have listened to these type of discussions again and again since 1995 when I first moved to Ireland and it normally consists of a lot of posturing, name-dropping and lip-service. In the end none if it really amounts to anything. Even Ireland Offline with all their good intentions have achieved very little since they were first formed. Yes, there is more broadband Internet available than 5 years ago but we are still near the bottom of the European statistics and I am fairly sure that the little growth that we have had would have happened anyway. Lobying or no lobying...

As this subject is close enough to my heart to sometimes bring my blood-pressure to dangerously high levels I decided to email the show with some questions that I would like them to ask the participants.
Below are my questions:

- Why all the talk about Local Loop Unbundling when this makes no real business sense ?

- What is ComReg doing to stimulate the establishment of an alternative telecoms infrastructure?

- Can ComReg explain the strange licensing structure the WiFi & Wimax frequencies that will only lead to interference between networks?

- What is causing the delay in the MAN rollout as supported by the EU (http://muniwireless.com/municipal/watch/1091).

- What has happened to all the funding allocated to the Group Broadband schemes that was never spent?

- On that note what is happening to ensure that the established GBS’s are achieving their targets?

Did these questions get featured? Off course not. Instead what we got was some general, rhetorical questions that were mostly brushed over. Most of the participants busied themselves spouting the usual buzzwords (wireless, WiFi, Wimax, FWA etc.) But to discuss the plan to bring Wimax to the 5 main urban areas, which are already served by DSL, cable, FWA & FTTH, while the majority of the rural areas are not or under-served by broadband is just puzzling to say the least.
I will not start blowing our own trumpet but this proves to me again that Wimax EU is jumping into a huge opening in the market.

To be fair I have to admit that I received an email from the show today.
Quote: "Hi Evert,

Thank you very much for getting in touch and for contributing your comments. I'm also sorry to read from Damien's blog that you were disappointed with the outcome of the discussion. Please be assured that it is something we will be returning to in the new year so hopefully we will be able to cover many other aspects of the subject in time - it is very hard to have a satisfying and rounded discussion in the amount of time we are allotted in the show.

Please keep in touch if you feel there are developments we should be aware of, and I will give you a call when we are coming back to this in the new year.

Thanks again,

Regards ,

Patrick

Assistant Producer, The Last Word"

I will see what happens....

E.