Too many missing details put this wireless broadband technology into the wait-and-see category.
The buzz from vendors and carriers about the broadband wireless technology called mobile WiMAX is heating up, fueled by new chipsets and radio products and fanned by some huge carrier investments.
For example, Clearwire in the summer rounded up $900 million, including $600 million from WiMAX zealot Intel, to upgrade its growing wireless broadband net to support the IEEE’s 802.16e mobile WiMAX standard.
And Sprint Nextel in August became the first U.S. cellular provider to announce plans to deploy a nationwide mobile WiMAX net in the licensed 2.5GHz frequency band.
The carrier will begin offering mobile WiMAX services next year, says Peter Cannistra, a strategic planning director at Sprint.
Intel says it plans to incorporate a mobile WiMAX chipset into its Centrino wireless package, which today supports only connections. The WiMAX addition is expected in 2007 and would enable WiMAX to be embedded in laptops and other clients, as Wi-Fi connectivity is today.
For the enterprise, mobile WiMAX promises support of multimedia applications and collaboration.
But despite the latest advances, the enterprise won’t feel the impact and importance for months, if not years.
WiMAX flavors
So far, the limited U.S. deployments of WiMAX have been for the fixed version of the underlying IEEE standard 802.16d, mainly as carrier or wireless provider backhaul or Internet access services. With fixed WiMAX, stationary users link to a base station through a companion radio mounted outside a house or business, as an alternative to DSL or cable Internet access.
The 802.16e standard, approved in late 2005, takes WiMAX on the move. Once laptops, tablets and PDAs, are outfitted with mobile WiMAX cards, they will be able to create and keep a multimegabit link to a 16e base station while in motion – on board a train or in a car, for example. Downlink speed will be 4Mbps, with 2Mbps uplinks and a range between 3 and 5 miles, chip vendors say. That compares with 10 to 15 miles and somewhat higher throughput for fixed WiMAX with a good line of site to the base station.
But real-world data showing these mobile WiMAX statistics is missing. Sprint, for example, won’t release details of field tests conducted over the past 12 months with its partners Intel, Motorola and Samsung. And technical and pricing concerns abound.
As a result, many enterprise users are shelving consideration of mobile WiMAX for the time being. One example is the city of Austin, Texas. CIO Peter Collins says he sees the potential of mobile broadband in supporting video streams from cameras in police cruisers to dispatchers. Fixed WiMAX is OK with stationary cameras, “but once you start moving a patrol car, it doesn’t work,” he says.
“I’m going to be more than willing to take a look at [mobile WiMAX],” Collins says, once he has proof that the mobile connectivity works and can see what kind of performance it delivers under load.
Despite increasing carrier and vendor activity, Collins may have a while to wait.
For one, the standard is undergoing extensive reworking, through the IEEE’s routine corrigendum process for correcting errors, inconsistencies and ambiguities in a standard. Begun in September, that corrigendum work is focused on compatibility and interoperability, says Greg Phillips, CEO and CTO of AirTegrity Wireless, a broadband equipment maker and member of the .16e committee.
WiMAX wariness
Also at issue is how .16e’s mobility requirements will affect how much data is transferable over the wireless connection. Initially, the IEEE estimated that mobile WiMAX would deliver 15% to 20% less bandwidth than fixed WiMAX. “But now, we’re seeing 30% to 35% less bandwidth available,” Phillips says.
Without knowing how much bandwidth mobile WiMAX will provide, enterprise network executives have a hard time assessing whether the technology would meet their application requirements better than offerings such as Wi-Fi and ever-improving cellular nets such as Revision A. Sprint will start offering Rev A services in 2007, with an average download rate of 450K to 800Kbps, and an average uplink range of 300K to 400Kbps. While those rates are a far cry from megabit WiMAX services, they may be plenty for existing enterprise mobility requirements. For now, those typically call for e-mail, sometimes with attachments, or access to limited subsets of inventory and customer data.
“We’re early enough in the [mobile WiMAX] market so that the enterprise isn’t sure what it wants,” says Tom Jazny, a vice president for Samsung Telecommunications America, which will be a mobile WiMAX supplier to Sprint. “Mobile WiMAX is capable of delivering voice, data and video, but it’s not clear [yet] what the carriers will lead with.”
Also lacking is information on equipment availability and services costs, as well as security. On the latter, the history of Wi-Fi security problems is likely to make enterprise network executives wary regarding mobile WiMAX. While the WiMAX standard does include security, and WiMAX will run in licensed and less-open spectrum than Wi-Fi, before buying into the buzz, enterprise users will want to know exactly what equipment vendors and carriers are doing to protect the mobile WiMAX network.
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