WiMax counts as 3G, ITU says
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WiMax earned an important seal of approval on Thursday when the Radiocommunication Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)&#160;certified it as a 3G mobile data technology.Heavily promoted by Intel and sometimes criticized as overhyped, WiMax is based on industry standards but has been the young upstart in the telecommunications industry. With this week&#39;s decision in Geneva by the radio group, also called ITU-R, it can finally rub shoulders with widely deployed technologies such as WCDMA and CDMA-2000.Many governments dictate technologies when they allocate wireless spectrum, and they typically look to the ITU, which is affiliated with the United Nations, to say what technologies qualify. WiMax will now be one of their choices when faced with a requirement for 3G, which the ITU calls IMT-2000.&quot;Having the ITU say that it counts really opens up some opportunities,&quot; said Peter Jarich of Current Analysis Inc. In particular, carriers that participate in upcoming auctions in Europe may choose WiMax instead of the more established 3G systems, he said. Broader deployments of WiMax in Europe, which has seen a few rollouts so far, would help increase production volumes and in turn lower equipment prices worldwide, according to Jarich.The ITU-R approval is a victory for advocates of technology neutrality, who want carriers to have more choices for high-speed wireless deployments, Jarich said. In most parts of the world, 3G is dominated by WCDMA, the next step on the migration path from GSM. But the ITU-R has also recognized CDMA-2000, the 3G upgrade to CDMA networks, and TD-SCDMA (Time Division-Synchronous Code-Division Multiple Access), developed in China, as well as other technologies.&quot;To have WiMax approved as an IMT-2000 technology is a huge win for the WiMax Forum,&quot; said Ron Resnick, president of the WiMax Forum, the industry group that certifies interoperability of products using the technology.What the standards body actually voted to support was OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing), which forms the basis of WiMax today but is also set to power future technologies, including LTE (Long-Term Evolution), a system now under development as the next step in the GSM migration path. Commercial LTE deployment is expected in 2009 or 2010.WiMax, based on the IEEE 802.16 standard, is designed to deliver IP data traffic at multiple megabits per second over a range of several kilometers. A fixed version is already certified by the WiMax Forum industry group, which plans to start certifying interoperability among mobile products next year. Sprint Nextel and Clearwire plan to deploy WiMax in markets across the U.S. starting late this year in what is set to be the biggest rollout yet.
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A UN telecommunications agency has approved WiMax as a global standard for mobile devices, which will pave the way for widespread adoption of the platform as a method for next-generation cellular data transfer.
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PicoChip's base station for the 4G mobile standard LTE can also run WiMax.
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Australasian operators set up 'spectrum club' Roaming is one of the critical success factors for any network seeking to be a global standard, and WiMAX is no exception. So far, the main roaming activity has centered on the pre-WiMAX Wi-Bro system, with the formation of the Wi-Bro and Mobile WiMAX Community (WMC) by leading Asian operators plus Covad.â¦
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Standards can't keep up with market Analysis It is increasingly obvious that standards processes are falling hopelessly behind the real time to market needs of vendors. In WiMAX and, particularly, Wi-Fi, markets suppliers are pre-empting ratified standards by ever longer margins. Initially, as with the 54Mbps 802.11g Wi-Fi system and with 802.16d, 'pre-standard' products were built to the finalized IEEE specification, but had not yet achieved any independent certification of this.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Mary Chan, president of the wireless business group atÂ newly merged Alcatel-Lucent, isn't choosing sides in the prickly debate about next-generation mobile communication networks. "One thing is certain," Chan said in an interview at last week's Telecom World conference in Hong Kong. "With the next generation, we're going to see all-IP networks capable of providing voice-over-IP and high-speed data throughput." Alcatel-Lucent has a foot in both the cellular and wireless camps -- and sees opportunities for both. The company aims to be at the forefront of this convergence by offering IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) technology as "a fundamental architecture for service transformation," Chan said. The buzzword in the cellular community is LTE (Long-Term Evolution), which, as its name suggests, builds on existing cellular technology. The wireless camp supports a mobile version of WiMax, based on the IEEE 802.16e standard. Both technologies will be based on OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) and offer speeds up to 100Mbps. What could differentiate the two systems at the end of the day is not so much the technology as the type operator that favors the one or the other, according to Chan. Cellular operators view LTE as an evolution of their 3G (third-generation) mobile broadband systems and, as such, are likely to deploy the technology where they have existing infrastructure. Some may choose to use mobile WiMax to plug the holes. New Internet operators, including some of the existing Wi-Fi service providers, are expected to deploy mobile WiMax. Regardless of the radio technology, "ubiquitous coverage will be a key success factor," Chan said. That remark can be interpreted as a word of warning to numerous mobile phone operators that have pared down their 3G (third generation) rollout to save on costs and have seen Wi-Fi operators both big and small pick away at their mobile data business.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Cellular operators in the U.K. are expected to start testing new technology to improve indoor reception of 3G wireless signals.
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Maxis Communications Bhd targets to launch its third-generation (3G) mobile services in the first quarter of 2005, but it expects the number of subscribers to be less than 100,000 during the first year due to the expensive handsets.
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Indonesia has begun rolling out its first-ever third generation (3G) cellular services, a report has said.
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Get your spectrum here, lovely spectrum, we got all sorts Ofcom has announced a third consultation on the bidding process for 2.6GHz and 2010MHz, both frequencies being desirable for the next-generation telephony crowd including both the WiMAX and LTE standards.â¦
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By James Connell  Eric Pfanner contributed reporting from London.   *  WiMax, the long-range wireless Internet standard backed by technology giants like Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, Nokia and Samsung, is unlikely to be appear as a new feature on cellphones anytime soon.
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Ofcom promises to think about it The GSM Association, trade body of the mobile phone industry, is calling for regulators around the world to allow the use of 3G technology in the 900MHz band.â¦
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KUALA LUMPUR (Dow Jones)--Maxis Communications Bhd. Monday signed an agreement for Siemens Mobile Networks, Asia Pacific to provide third-generation, or 3G, technology for the Malaysian mobile phone operator over the next three years.
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Prime real estate up for grabs Ofcom, the UK's the broadcast regulator, has tagged WiMAX mobile wireless as a likely source of revenue for the public purse.â¦
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Number of users with high-speed connections has tripled in the last three years.
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(InfoWorld) - NTT DoCoMo has embarked on a month-long experiment of a Super 3G (third-generation) cellular system. The indoor experiment will test data transmission speed and NTT DoCoMo hopes to hit a downlink speed of 300Mbps, it said Friday. First trails will involve the use of a single antenna on both the transmitter and receiver and then the use of up to four multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas. The tests will also look at the speed with which communications can be handed from one base station to another. Super 3G, which is also known by the acronym LTE (long-term evolution), uses the same radio spectrum band as current 3G services, but that's one of the few similarities. Super 3G allows for a number of different bandwidth channels and uses different modulation systems to transmit the data. It is envisaged to eventually allow data links at 80Mbps to the network and 300Mbps from the network. The company, which is Japan's largest cellular carrier, has been working on Super 3G for some time and anticipates introducing the technology in Japan sometime around 2009 as a stepping stone between current so-called 3.5G technology and future 4G (fourth-generation) systems. NTT DoCoMo has also been aggressively pursuing 4G system development. In experiments conducted in late December last year the carrier came close to hitting aÂ 5Gbps data transmission speedÂ from an experimental 4G system to a receiver moving at 10 kilometers per hour. Â
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Europe has been slow to adopt 3G mobile-phone services, and now the opportunity for cashing in may have passed. A new Wi-Fi design from a British company threatens to cut away the ground 3G has gained. By Wendy Grossman.