How different WiMax products are being used to monitor oil pipelines, run smart grids and keep people from parking outside the provost's house
While WiMax has lost the battle to be the 4G technology of choice for most U.S. consumer handsets, it’s still alive and kicking in the enterprise market.
That’s because companies have found that WiMax can be an effective wireless data technology for a wide variety of uses besides downloading Angry Birds onto your iPad. WiMax Forum Vice President Mohammad Shakouri says that although major U.S. wireless carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have chosen to deploy LTE over 700MHz spectrum, WiMax will still find a home delivering data for a wide variety of U.S. industries including airports, oil and gas companies and the burgeoning smart grid industry.
“The difference between the WiMax industry and LTE is that WiMax is also going more after complementary solutions,” he explains. “You will see WiMax providing communications needs in terms of building things such as the smart grid.”
GREATEST TECH ARGUMENTS: WiMax vs. LTE
Smart grid technology is typically defined as any information technology that helps power companies more efficiently monitor demand and allocate capacity. Australian power company SP AusNet is helping its customers install roughly 700,000 WiMax-based smart meters into their homes that will deliver data on power usage to the company over a two-hour window every day to give them better insight on how and when their customers are using energy. The company is about one-third of the way through its smart meter deployment and expects to be finished by 2013.
John Theunissen, the director of smart networks at SP AusNet, says that WiMax delivers significantly more bandwidth than needed to run daily power readings, thus making it an ideal wireless technology for monitoring power usage. He also says that the added bandwidth makes it much easier to get real-time updates to quickly figure out where failures in the network are occurring.
“The thing that was tantalizing for us was … the degree of latency and real-time support we found we could get out of 4G,” he says. “It’s allowed us to expand the range of our protection systems, so that devices out on network can now isolate faults within the network in just milliseconds.”
Here in the United States, power companies aren’t just using WiMax as a wireless technology for smart grids but are deploying it to monitor other critical functions as well. Fuel transportation company Explorer Pipeline is one of the early adopters of Sprint’s WiMax-based 4G Enterprise WAN and has rolled out the network at its storage facility in Houston. Greg Wagnon, a senior network engineer at Explorer Pipeline, says that Explorer uses the new WiMax-based WAN primarily to handle supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) traffic that is used to operate the pipeline and control pressure valves to ensure safety, among other things.
Wagnon says that the addition of WiMax has made it possible for him to give the pipeline’s operations both dedicated 4G bandwidth and satellite-based backup in case of network failure. Previously he had to fit both pipeline operations data and administrative traffic onto a 3G CDMA network with satellite backup, whereas now he uses Sprint’s 3G CDMA network to back up administrative traffic alone.
While Wagnon has installed the 4G WAN onto just one site so far, he plans to bring it to two more and cites major benefits in terms of total added bandwidth and latency, which he says is around half of what he experienced on Sprint’s 3G network. He also says that Sprint has been a big help in both installing and offering performance guarantees for the 4G Enterprise WAN, thus saving him a lot of headaches when it comes to restoring connectivity when it goes offline.
“Before, if it went down, I could usually come up with a good solution but I was pretty much on my own,” he says. “Now if it goes down they will work to restore it. Before they were only responsible just for their own network and towers but now they are responsible all the way down to the 4G modem. So now they’re handling all the modem-level stuff that I had to do before.”
Of course, not every organization needs to rely on a carrier such as Sprint to get the benefits of WiMax. Northern Michigan University, for one, has employed Intel and Motorola to build a WiMax network that serves its 9,600 students and is operated by the university’s own IT department. The network consists of 14 different base stations and covers a radius of more than 30 miles to accommodate the 6,000 or so students who live off-campus. NMU CTO Dave Maki says that the university decided to build a private network because it proved to be cheaper to run than purchasing network access from a carrier.
“We tried basically partnering with carriers in the past and it always works out that no matter how you do a deal, you’re paying the full subscriber rate for the students,” he says. “So we looked at the different technologies available and WiMax was the only one readily available that fit our needs.”
The university began asking Intel about ways to provide off-campus wireless connectivity to its students and the company set up a meet-and-greet with Motorola, which subsequently signed a deal to provide network gear to the school. Intel, which has been closely partnering with NMU for years and runs wireless tests at the school’s validation lab, helped the school set up the network.
The school has had a laptop program for its students since 2000 and for years got by with a patchwork of Wi-Fi hotspots, moving all the way from 802.11a to 802.11n standards before taking the WiMax plunge. While the school does still use Wi-Fi as its primary way of connecting students when on campus, Maki says that WiMax’s long-range and seamless handoffs made it an easy choice to use as NMU’s off-campus wireless technology.
“Before deploying WiMax we probably had four different hotspots in town,” he explains. “We decided to put one on top of our provost’s house because he had a high house up on a hill. The problem was he’d wind up with lots of people parked outside his house.”
Needless to say, with the installation of WiMax throughout a 30-mile radius, the provost no longer suffers from traffic congestion in his driveway.
“You can drive six to seven miles throughout the city and never lose a connection,” says Maki. “People just expect it to work.”
