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

Cisco’s buy of WiMAX vendor Navini shows the network giant sees broadband wireless access as a key technology. Just don’t expect it to blossom overnight.

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.

“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.

According to analysts, base station and client equipment currently certified by the WiMAX Forum runs only on the 3.5GHz frequency, which in the United States is reserved for military use. Some fixed WiMAX-compatible but not yet certified equipment is available on the 5.8GHz band. Orr expects these products to win certification in the future.

Orr says the quick uptake in advanced cellular data services such as EV-DO Revision A and HSDPA could be preparing the ground for acceptance of mobile WiMAX services. “People have a chance to see what these data services are like, with various device form factors, and getting Internet access with speeds closer to [wired] DSL all the time, with no location restrictions,” Orr says. But mobile WiMAX should match or exceed wired speeds people are used to at home, he says.

And these services are likely to be very affordable, according to analysts and vendors. Network providers can make use of their existing cell or wireless broadband sites, for example, keeping property and construction costs down. The open standards approach of WiMAX introduces strong competitive market pressures to every component in the WiMAX network, Orr points out. By contrast, CDMA nets have a cost structure that’s determined in part by the royalties set by the company that controls the CDMA intellectual property portfolio, Qualcomm.

Executives at Nortel say their studies show that WiMAX nets can be deployed at up to one-sixth the cost of today’s 3G nets. “Base stations are smaller, more compact than for 2G and 3G nets, and because it’s based on a flat IP architecture, WiMAX means there’s less networking infrastructure needed,” says Danny Locklear, Nortel’s director of wireless product marketing.

With OFDM, and the use of wider radio channels, the capacity of each base station is greater. “You can use fewer base stations to cover the same area [compared to 2G/3G], or you can have the same number of nodes with greater performance,” Locklear says. “Many more subscribers can be brought into the [WiMAX] network.”

Sprint CTO Barry West has in the past made a similar argument, saying that WiMAX is one-tenth the cost per bit of CDMA. “It’s as simple as that,” he said in an earlier Network World interview. “It’s physics.”

WiMAX could spark other changes, according to Maravedis’ Orr. Today, customers register and use one handset on a wireless net. With IP-based WiMAX, Orr says, users can have multiple devices they want to use on the IP net, ranging from multimedia devices, VoIP phones, and even devices that today you have to hook to a PC such as digital cameras or iPods. “Don’t expect Kodak to introduce a device that has to be certified by Sprint before it can be used on the network,” Orr says.

He says new subscription models, still to be formulated, will let users register multiple devices on WiMAX nets and possibly pay as you use them on an hourly or daily basis.

Some of those models may find their first use in vertical markets. “There is a great opportunity [with WiMAX] for vertical applications such as safety, transportation, mobile workforce, education and healthcare,” says Monical Paolini, of Senza Fili. “Vertical applications represent an important new revenue stream that WiMAX enables, because these applications cannot be easily supported in cellular networks because of capacity limitations.”