SPRINT'S XOHM WIMAX SUPPORTED LAPTOP

Debuting today at CTIA 2008, the Cloudbook MAX not only boasts an 8.9-inch WVGA (1,024 x 600) display, Windows Vista, 802.11b/g WiFi, Bluetooth, integrated GPS receiver, 2-megapixel webcam and a battery good for four hours, but it also features an 80GB HDD, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, audio in / out and an S-Video output. Beyond all that, this thing gets energized by a 1.6GHz VIA C7-M ULV processor coupled with the VX800 digital media IGP chipset, which touts full DirectX 9 support and video acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, VC1 and DivX video formats (plus a VMR-capable HD video processor, among other things). Lastly, the unit includes built-in support for Sprint's XOHM WiMAX network. Brimming with excitement yet? Start stocking that piggy bank -- this currently unpriced rig will be available in the latter half of this year across North America.

Read - VIA and Everex demonstrate Cloudbook MAX at CTIA
Read - VIA VX800 Series Chipset

NOKIA N810 WIMAX INTERNET TABLET IS READY?

Nokia has showed their WiMax future N810 WiMax enabled tablet in CTIA 2008 conference, looks like it is getting official WiMax enabled ready for market of Nokia. Their main target is start to sell it in the most deployed WiMax network country USA for this summer. Beyond that, you'll notice the familiar 4.13-inch touchscreen, slide-out QWERTY keyboard and even a built-in webcam for video calls, Mozilla-powered browser, integrated GPS / media player, 2GB of internal memory and a microSD expansion slot. Heck, Nokia even touts this thing's ability to "access the Internet over WiFi or via conventional cellular data networks by pairing to a compatible mobile phone via Bluetooth technology." Also announced today is the freshly updated OS2008, which includes an enhanced e-mail client, support for Chinese character rendering in the browser and RSS feeds and "Seamless Software Update functionality" to boot. Needless to say, said OS will come standard on the currently unpriced Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition -- which is scheduled to land wherever WiMAX connectivity is available -- but existing N810 / N800 owners will also get the OS upgrade free of charge in Q2.

SIEMENS GIGASET SERIES RELEASING NEW EXPRESS CARD

Siemens putting the new card of their GIGASET WIMAX series products. The Gigaset SE68 WiMAX is based on the IEEE 802.16-2005 standard and complies with Wave 2 specifications (including MIMO A / B), supports beamforming and has actually been demonstrated as functional way over in Singapore. With a network in place, users can expect mobile broadband speeds of up to 20Mbps, and while no price is given, you can just circle the entire summer of 2008 in anticipation of its arrival.

MOBILE WIMAX DEPLOYMENT ALTERNATIVES

Traditionally, cellular deployments were based solely on achieving ubiquitous coverage with little consideration for capacity requirements. Since the only services offered were voice and the market was uncertain, this was a very reasonable approach. Moreover, the voice service offering is a low data rate application enabling traditional cellular networks to achieve wide outdoor and indoor coverage with a low data rate network (~10-15 kbps bandwidth depending on type of vocoder). As the customer base grew and more services offered, additional base stations were deployed and/or channels added to existing base stations to meet the growing capacity requirements. With Mobile WiMAX, however, operators will want to offer a wide range of broadband services with Quality-of-Service (QoS) support. To meet customer expectations for these types of services it will be necessary to predetermine capacity requirements and deploy accordingly at the outset. Careful deployment planning in anticipation of growing customer demands will ensure a quality user experience when the network is at its busiest.

Determining Capacity Requirements
Arriving at an accurate estimate of capacity requirements for new broadband services is not a simple exercise. One must anticipate how users will make use of the new services being offered and how often users will be actively engaged with the network. Data density, expressed as Mbps per km^2, is a convenient metric for describing capacity requirements. Determining the required data density for a specific demographic region is a multi-step process.The expected market penetration, or take-up rate, at maturity is dependent on a number of factors including the competitive situation and the services offered that distinguish one service provider from another. The service provider’s penetration may also vary within the metropolitan area since urban and dense urban residents will often have other broadband access alternatives from which to choose as compared to residents in suburban and rural areas.

Base Station Deployment Alternatives
Mobile WiMAX base station equipment will be available from many different vendors and, although all will be WiMAX compliant and meet performance and interoperability requirements, a great many different configurations will be available from which service providers can choose. The availability and timing of optional features also adds to the equipment variability. Additionally, there are different frequency bands that can be considered and varied amounts of spectrum availability within these bands. The spectrum choices will, in many cases, affect the frequency reuse factor and the channel bandwidths that can be employed in the access network.WiMAX solutions with beamforming will generally be architected quite differently from
SIMO and MIMO solutions. A typical SIMO or MIMO configuration will have power amplifiers mounted at the base of the tower to facilitate cooling and maintenance. The amplifiers in this case would have to be sized to compensate for cable losses, which can range from 2 to 4 dB depending on tower height and frequency. Beamforming solutions require good phase and amplitude control between transmitting elements and will often be architected with their power amplifiers integrated with the antenna elements in a tower-mounted array. The larger size and weight of these structures will also require more robust mounting. There is additional signal processing requirements for beamforming solutions with Adaptive Beamforming being the most computational intensive.

The selection of channel bandwidth and duplexing method can also have an economic impact on the varied WiMAX deployment alternatives. In addition the desired “worse case” UL rate will affect the UL link budget and therefore, impact the range and coverage of the base station.

Conventional cellular deployments used cell frequency reuse factors as high as seven (7) to mitigate intercellular co-channel interference (CCI). These deployments assured a minimal spatial separation of 5:1 between the interfering signal and the desired signal but required seven times as much spectrum. With technologies such as CDMA, introduced with 3G, and OFDMA, introduced with WiMAX, more aggressive reuse schemes can be employed to improve overall spectrum efficiency.

Number of Base Stations
The key metric for a quantified comparison will be the number of WiMAX base stations required to meet both capacity and coverage requirements in the varied demographic regions. The WiMAX base station is a key network element in connecting the core network to the enduser in that it determines the coverage of the network and defines the end-user experience. If too few base stations are deployed the coverage will not be ubiquitous and the end-user may experience drop outs or periods of poor performance due to weak signal levels as he moves throughout the coverage area. And since the base station investment will tend to be a dominant contributor to the total end-to-end network costs, deploying too many base stations can result in unnecessary start-up costs for the operator leading to a weaker business case.

Summing up
In the long term, the higher performance base stations with wideband channels provide a potentially more cost-effective deployment solution as measured by the number of required base stations. One might conclude that it would be worth waiting for antenna technologies such as beamforming and beamforming + MIMO and possibly even 20 MHz channels, before deploying a Mobile WiMAX network. This however, is not the case. In the early years , deployment can begin with range-limited base stations using (1x2) SIMO or (2x2) MIMO base station configurations to get ubiquitous coverage over the entire metropolitan area. These base stations can then be upgraded in the following years with beamforming and beamforming + MIMO as necessary to meet the capacity requirements in anticipation of a growing customer base. In most metropolitan area deployments this will only be necessary in the dense urban and urban areas.