Despite Cisco's play, WiMAX has long way to go

Cisco’s deal to acquire WiMAX equipment vendor Navini shines a bright light on this emerging technology.
But for corporate network executives, the light is largely ornamental as there aren’t any WiMAX networks in the United States, at least on any scale, so the slowly growing inventory of WiMAX client cards or adapters or customer premises equipment are, in general, high-tech paperweight – at least for now.

In a recent study, Solis concluded that WiMAX services will be widely available by 2009, and projects 95 million “fixed” CPE users and 200 million mobile device users equipped with WiMAX by 2012. in addition, a study by Infonetics Research, based on interviews at 550 companies of various sizes, predicts that mobile WiMAX will be adopted by 11% of them by 2011.

WiMAX is the term for products based on the first IEEE standard for wireless broadband access: 802.16d for fixed, and 802.16e for mobile WiMAX. Most analysts ultimately expect to see offering in both, with data rates of 1M to 4Mbps.

Click to see: WiMAX's evolution

“Enterprise deployment can use fixed WiMAX to provide network connectivity and Internet access, and backup connections, and small business will use fixed WiMAX as an alternative to T-1s,” says Phil Solis, WiMAX analysts with ABI Research. “Mobile WiMAX will be used by both enterprise customers and consumers, with consumers having a wider array of devices to use on the network, such as mobile Internet devices and consumer electronics such as portable media players, game devices, cameras.”

“The combination of fixed and mobile is a major difference of WiMAX compared to cellular,” says Monica Paolini, president of Sensz Fili Consulting, which tracks the wireless market. “Cellular services can not support mass market adoption of bundled fixed and mobile services, but WiMAX can.”

WiMAX achieves its data rates from a combination of advanced technologies that will also eventually undergird the evolution of both GSM and CDMA cellular nets. But the cellular carriers are pushing significant gains of EV-DO Revision A and HSDPA, and the promise of still higher data rates in the next few years.

But WiMAX also offers now, besides multimegabit data rates, an all-IP network. Among other things, IP makes for simpler and less expensive network infrastructures.

“One of the key components of whatever the [eventual] ‘4G’ standard will be is that is has to be all IP,” says Daryl Schoolar, research manager, wireless and mobile infrastructure at IDC. “It makes for a more efficient Internet network, compared to running IP over a voice network.”

The first mobile WiMAX services, from Sprint and ClearWire, won’t be activated before May 2008 at the earliest, on the licensed 2.5GHz band. Sprint has said its net, now dubbed XOHM, will be available to 100 million potential users by the end of 2008. “That’s a pretty aggressive timeline,” says Jeff Orr, senior analyst, for Maravedis, which covers the wireless broadband access market. Orr says smaller regional WiMAX providers, like Asburn, Virginia-based Digital Bridge Communications, are leasing 2.5GHz spectrum in the so-called ITFS band, originally set aside for colleges and universities to offer distance-learning TV broadcasts.