Mobile broadband, a clash of the Titans?
By ShockExcite Media Sdn Bhd
I'm sure everyone is aware of the very much anticipated Thrid Generation network "3G" services, Billions of Dollars spent, but is it getting there as soon as the operators hoped? However, everyone's talking about WiMAX these days, but other wireless broadband solutions are available already, and they provide one key benefit: mobility. For example South Korea's WiBro will be the first large network to test the promise of mobile WiMAX.
WiMAX gets most of the wide area wireless broadband attention these days, but people forget that there are other, competing solutions -- some of which are already available. Many even seemed to assume that WiMAX is a generic term that refers to any and all wide area wireless broadband technologies.
Like Japan, Koreans have long been leaders in adopting and developing mobile communications, as their planned mobile broadband access system, called WiBro (for Wireless Broadband), will be the first country-wide network to serve as a testing ground for what may become the leading international technology for mobile broadband: "mobile WiMAX" .
WiBro was first conceived as a Korean technology standard called HPi (for high-speed portable Internet), in which Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, SK Telecom and KT Corporation had invested heavily. However, as a Korean standard rivaling WiMAX's 802.16e, it presented barriers to non-Korean developers and manufacturers, requiring Korea to convince the rest of the world to adopt its standard. As a result, Korea brought an end to HPi earlier this year, agreeing to use the 802.16e standard for WiBro.
Given another scenario, Flarion has received a lot of attention for its offering, as it has signed up high-profile trials in the US, Asia, Europe and Australia. In the US, Nextel (which, it should be noted, is trialling just about every possible wireless broadband technology around) is running a test in the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina which it launched last February. Some writers for Mobile Pipeline tested out the technology and were unexpectedly surprised with how well it worked -- especially when tested on the go, in a car. The bandwidth was still quite fast (much faster than any 3G solution, yes it's true, sigh...) and even the latency was impressive.
The IP Wireless solution, a viable challenger with trial deployments around the world, unfortunately hasn't received as much attention. Earlier this year, Pacific Century Cyber Works (PCCW) bought up plenty of spectrum around the UK for use in a wide area wireless broadband solution. While some in the press mistakenly referred to the PCCW offering as WiMAX, it was really using TDD. However, now, the company admits that the reason it went with TDD over WiMAX was mobility. While there are some questions about whether or not the spectrum licenses PCCW owns allow mobile solutions, it does, once again, emphasize the importance of mobility.
WiMAX still has plenty of potential, of course. Lots of very large companies are lining up behind it. However, the real differentiator for wide area wireless broadband is going to be mobility and what that allows. While other solutions already have that available today, WiMAX is lagging behind.
Mobility the Key:
The promise of WiBro and mobile WiMAX. To deliver mobility with high speed and cost-effectiveness of an all-IP, all-packetized data system, offering users things like streaming video and music, video and music on demand, online gaming, broadcasting and VoIP. With mobile WiMAX, the cost of a given bundle of data will be low because there will be no circuit-switching in the system and because of the fundamental efficiencies of OFDM vs. CDMA, though WiBro won't support high ground speeds – it's designed to provide seamless connectivity over the 2.3 GHz spectrum at ground speeds up to about 60 Kph with an average bandwidth of 1 Mbps.
WiBro is intended as an evolutionary system. "Ground speed is a trade-off with data speed, and both are limited by the cell-site parameters. At the outset, we do not want to burden the system unduly, nor do we want WiBro to compete immediately with the 2.5G and 3G networks. We will test the system and improve data speed and connectivity over time," quoting Professor Dong-Ho Cho of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
Who will benefit most from WiBro?
A given example of a non-Korean company that will benefit from WiBro is TeleCIS Wireless, a fabless semiconductor firm based in Santa Clara, California. The company, which has a strategic alliance with Samsung and KT Corporation, is focused on developing integrated multi-protocol wireless broadband chipsets, and it is positioning itself to be a leading provider of chipsets with flexible interfaces for a variety of markets, applications and devices. "We are very interested in WiBro and mobile WiMAX," says David Sumi, vice president marketing of TeleCIS Wireless and also secretary of the WiMAX Forum. "TeleCIS's first product will be a dedicated 802.16 WiMAX-compliant fixed access chip. This will be followed rapidly by a dual-mode -- fixed and mobile -- WiMAX chip for notebooks, PDAs, handsets and other devices. Following that, we will introduce a tri-mode product for fixed and mobile WiMAX, plus the WLAN 802.11-a, -b and -g protocols, all in a single chip."
Vision vs Reality
Since mobile broadband will not be a commercial reality anytime soon. It would be a greater advantage for manufacturers to plan well into the future as Korea plans to issue three licenses for WiBro service in early 2005, probably to KT Corporation, SK Telecom and Hanaro Telecom. Commercial service is expected to begin in 2006, but it will be another two years before all Korean cities have the service. By then, officials project that WiBro will have 10 million subscribers.
The real growth for fixed WiMAX will come in developing countries that have little competing infrastructure, while that of mobile WiMAX will most likely be in countries where sophisticated users will expect broadband everywhere. China, India and less developed countries will be especially big markets.
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