Research firm: Weaker voice will hold back WiMax
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InfoWorld - The GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) family of technologies will continue to dominate the mobile infrastructure business over the next five years, a research company said Wednesday.
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While many are just adjusting to the fast wireless technology behind WiMax, the head of Sprint Nextel's Xohm is planning new ways to charge for the service and how to meet the needs of huge numbers of Internet users.
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Sprint has started the process of launching its Xohm mobile WiMax network with a "soft launch" to a limited number of users in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington.
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The message is clear at this week's Intel Developer Forum: The company wants to help you get more mobile. It's putting its weight behind WiMax, a wireless-data standard that has been five years in coming and still hasn't hit the consumer market.
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Despite all of the hype surrounding WiMax, chip maker Texas Instruments Inc. remains unconvinced the technology will revolutionize the way that broadband Internet services are delivered to homes and offices, according to a company executive.
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One of the big complaints lodged against wireless phone companies is poor signal quality inside buildings, especially homes.
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InfoWorld - Singapore&#39;s Nex-G Systems&#160;is designing a WiMax base station based on an IBM processor, even though it&#39;s not the best chip for the job. But that doesn&#39;t worry Ronnie Persad, the company&#39;s chief executive officer.
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Now that&#160;WiMax has been certified as a form of 3G mobile data infrastructure, Sprint Nextel is changing its tune about the WiMax network it plans to launch commercially in April.Last year when Sprint was shopping around for a &quot;4G&quot; technology, it had a lot to say about how 4G would do something 3G networks couldn&#39;t. WiMax won out as its 4G network of choice. But in a keynote address Thursday at CTIA Wireless I.T. &amp; Entertainment in San Francisco, an executive of Sprint&#39;s WiMax business, Xohm, sang a different tune.&quot;I think we spend entirely too much time talking about the Gs,&quot; said Atish Gude, senior vice president of mobile broadband operations at Sprint. Last week, the Radiocommunication Sector of the International Telecommunication Union certified WiMax as a 3G technology, providing a seal of approval many governments require for carriers to deploy it. Wider deployment generally means lower equipment prices, which helps service providers.That&#39;s not to say the carrier no longer wants to differentiate WiMax. In his presentation, Gude played up the wide band of spectrum Xohm will be able to use, which he said will cut down on delays for individual users the same way a multilane freeway can move faster than a two-lane highway even when the speed limit is the same. In the real world, a lot of people want to use the network at the same time, he said.But more important is the business model of the two networks, Gude said, characterizing the traditional cellular business as more closed and controlled, while Xohm&#39;s business will tap into the dynamics of the open Internet. The company is opening itself up to partners for application development as well as connected devices, he said. The best known of these deals, announced in July, was&#160;an agreement with Google to develop a variety of Internet-based services.Sprint hopes a wide range of devices, including cameras, media players, and in-car electronics, ultimately will connect to the WiMax network. Instead of Sprint stores, they will be sold in the most logical places for their device types, such as consumer electronics stores. The first devices to come for Xohm next year will be wireless cards for notebook PCs, which Gude expects to be sold in the computer departments of electronics stores.The company will also have open API for third parties to develop services to run on the network. As an example, Gude envisioned a video portal that users could navigate using the five buttons traditionally found on video players. Xohm will probably charge for some of what it offers to third parties, but its aim is not to stifle innovation, he said.Sprint isn&#39;t getting out of its cellular business now that it&#39;s starting Xohm -- which it expects to reach 100 million U.S. residents by the end of 2008 -- but seems to be looking at it in a different light now.&quot;We are a content distribution industry,&quot; Gude said. It&#39;s just that for most of cellular&#39;s history, all the content has been user-generated and consisted of talking.
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The recent stir created by Verizon Wireless when it turned down a text-message campaign from an abortion rights group, and then quickly reversed itself, is a reminder that wireless carriers, just like their wired counterparts, should not decide what kind of traffic rides over their rails.
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Sprint Nextel and its hardware partners sought to convince a small audience at the Consumer Electronics Show that their WiMax plans are on track, despite the recent departure of Sprint&#39;s CEO and the dissolution of its partnership with Clearwire.&quot;We are exactly where we said we&#39;d be,&quot; said Barry West, Sprint Nextel&#39;s CTO and president of the company&#39;s Xohm WiMax business unit. Sprint is in the process of soft-launching in Chicago and Baltimore, he said.Executives from Nokia and Samsung said they both expect to have user devices ready for the second-quarter launch. In addition, Motorola said it is working on a device that will operate over Sprint&#39;s EvDO (evolution, data optimized) cellular network, Wi-Fi, and WiMax.Since the&#160;ouster of Gary Forsee, the former CEO and chairman of Sprint Nextel, who was thought to be a champion of the company&#39;s WiMax plans, onlookers have speculated that the network might not roll out as planned. In addition,&#160;Sprint Nextel ended a partnership with Clearwire&#160;to jointly deploy WiMax, a further cause for uncertainty. Sprint has been hemorrhaging mobile subscribers and recording declining revenues since its purchase of Nextel.Beyond the unrest internally at Sprint, the company faces critics of WiMax who say that the technology won&#39;t work as well as cellular technologies in a mobile environment and that it won&#39;t support international roaming as easily as the cellular standards.But in describing the reasons why Sprint chose WiMax and why it intends to aggressively pursue the network, West further sought to soothe market qualms about the future.&quot;Being first to market is a huge advantage,&quot; he said. &quot;And WiMax technology is here, now, and mature.&quot;While an investment in a totally new technology requires a strong reason for change, this won&#39;t be the first time Sprint&#39;s doing it, he noted. WiMax doesn&#39;t follow on the upgrade path for CDMA, the basis for Sprint&#39;s cellular network, so it requires a totally new network.Sprint did that first when it moved from an analog cellular network to digital, West said. The same went for the move to third-generation technology, although in that case Sprint stuck with the CDMA path.Sprint also considered LTE (Long Term Evolution), a fourth-generation mobile technology, but one big disadvantage is that it&#39;s not yet available, he said.Moving to WiMax represents a shift to a new air interface technology: OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) instead of CDMA, which is the basis of the current 3G technologies. According to West, when CDMA is deployed in a wider section of spectrum, which helps boost throughput, the computational complexity required goes up exponentially. That requires higher-performance chips, which come with a steep price tag, he said.With WiMax, Sprint plans to use a wide section of spectrum that can dynamically switch from carrying data up or down, depending on user requirements, he said.Beyond the radically different network technology, Sprint envisions a very different business model than cellular, one that will support any kind of standard device.&quot;Look at the cellular model. It was very successful but also very frustrating,&quot; West said. He was referring to the business model in the United States where operators subsidize phones and then require long-term subscriptions from users.With Xohm, Sprint will allow any WiMax-compliant device to run on the network, he said. End-users will buy the devices themselves, probably at a variety of retail stores and hopefully for a low price because vendors expect the cost of WiMax chips to drop dramatically, like Wi-Fi. &quot;Since I&#39;ve got no money in you, I don&#39;t need a contract,&quot; West said. That opens the door to a wide array of new pricing scenarios. End-users could pay for the day, week, month, or on a regular subscription, he said.While West declined to cite specific prices, he said a monthly subscription to Xohm will be comparable to existing DSL rates.Initially, Sprint will sell PC cards and modems, but by the end of this year as many as&#160;10 different kinds of devices could be available, he said. Navigation and gaming devices are possibilities, he said.If the market has any doubts about Sprint&#39;s plans for the network, it should rest assured that, regardless, the future of WiMax is more certain, panelists said. &quot;WiMax is bigger than Sprint,&quot; said Sriram Viswanathan, vice president and general manager for Intel Capital and for Intel&#39;s WiMax business.Motorola alone has 17 contracts for networks and is involved in 60 trials, said Fred Wright, senior vice president and general manager at Motorola. &quot;This technology is real, it&#39;s not a fairy tale,&quot; he said.
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A consortium led by Japanese telecommunications company KDDI and backed by Intel will receive one of two WiMax licenses to be awarded soon by the Japanese government, a report said Tuesday.The group, called Wireless Broadband Planning, and one led by rival carrier Willcom will be recommended by Japan&#39;s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications on Friday to a panel charged with selecting the groups to win the licenses, said the Tuesday morning edition of The Nikkei newspaper. The panel is expected to follow the ministry&#39;s recommendations.The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications could not immediately be reached for comment.Intel owns a 17.65 percent stake in Wireless Broadband Planning. The stake is matched by East Japan Railway and Kyocera, and all three sit behind leading shareholder KDDI, which has a 32.26 percent stake.The WiMax services will operate in the 2.5GHz band and will be capable of providing data service at up to 20Mbps to terminals travelling at up to 100 kilometers per hour, according to the Japanese government.Japan&#39;s cell phone carriers have been testing WiMax for some time, and Tuesday&#39;s report, if confirmed, will mean that market leader NTT DoCoMo and number three-ranked Softbank probably will have to lease networks from KDDI or Willcom if they are to offer competing services.KDDI is Japan&#39;s number two cellular carrier. It had 29 million subscriptions to its CDMA2000 cell phone service at the end of November this year, according to official figures. Willcom, which uses the PHS (Personal Handyphone System) technology to offer a data-centric service, had 4.6 million subscriptions.In contrast, NTT DoCoMo had 53 million subscriptions, and Softbank had 17.4 million subscriptions. Both carriers operate WCDMA (Wideband CDMA) networks.
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A high-speed wireless technology that  is still in development promises to make mobile Web surfing  about four times faster, but its impact on the embattled  network equipment industry will be much less dramatic,  according to industry executives.
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Mobile communications firm Motorola   MOT.N has high hopes for the mobile version of WiMAX   broadband, the company's technology head said in a newspaper   interview.
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While the news about municipal Wi-Fi has been grim lately, columnist Craig Mathias describes why he thinks it will inevitably succeed.
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THE CAPITAL division of Intel has invested in a Seattle firm in bid to promote the WiMAX wireless standard. Speakeasy, based in Seattle, is a beneficiary from the Intel Communications Fund but it&#39;s not clear
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InfoWorld - Laptops aren&#39;t the only computers slated to get support for WiMax next year.
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Collaborations to help spread WiMAX are still up in the air.