WIMAX FORUM: IS THIS THE END?

Word on the street today is that the main WiMAX Forum office in Portland has closed its doors. Some 40 people will no longer be working there, leaving only Chairman Ron Resnick and one other person to hold down the fort.

WiMax Forum recently opened a San Diego office which will also serve as a location for other WiMAX Forum team members. WiMAX Forum Certification testing will continue at the Cetecom labs in Spain, where cross-compatible WiMAX products have been tested for nearly 5 years.

The WiMAX Forum is an industry-led, not-for-profit organization, formed to certify and promote the compatibility and interoperability of WiMAX. IEEE 802.16 developed the technical standard for WiMAX.

But development and buildout slowed as telcos developed their own “4G” system (LTE) and governments waited for the economic downturn to pass before auctioning off their last, best chunk of spectrum for “4G” – some 200 MHz around 2.5-2.6 GHz.

Now, as spectrum auctions began in earnest, LTE has become the strong favorite — FDD in the 140 Mhz of paired frequencies, and TDD-LTE dominating in the 50 MHz unpaired chunk. WiMAX appears to becoming an outlier.

WiMAX Forum members, it is rumored, are bailing from the organization. With fewer members, WiMax Forum doesn’t have the juice to sponsor meetings and promote the standard. Some believe WiMax Forum may be folded into other industry organizations such as the Broadband Forum.

We’re still trying to get confirmation from Ron Resnick about the reported layoffs, and what the move to the new San Diego office may mean for WiMax Forum.

If WiMax is largely abandoned, what would the world loose?

• It’s an open standard supported by IEEE.
• Runs on both licensed and unlicensed frequencies.
• An established, interoperabile system, well matched for data-centric networks.
• An easy, compatible upgrade to 100Mbps mobile.
• A low-cost solution for governments, energy, education and independent ISPs
• Competition to cellular carriers.

Originally the WiMAX Forum projected covering 100 million subscribers in the United States by 2008 with some 120 million global subscribers by 2012. It’s running late.

THE XO-3 TABLET

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project founder Nicholas Negroponte said that the organization is accelerating its development of the XO-3 tablet computer and will have a working prototype by December 2010, two years ahead of projections. Negroponte said the final product would cost US$75.

OLPC announced today that it has signed an agreement with chipmaker Marvell to jointly develop the next generation of OLPC XO devices, the first of which will be a tablet. As part of the deal, OLPC will also make its design and reference work available to Marvell and its partners in order to get its technology more widely adopted.

The Marvell Moby Tablet platform is powered by a 1GHz Marvell ARMADA 610 processor with integrated 802.11bn WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and FM radio features. It supports 1080p HD video encoding and decoding capabilities as well as 3D graphics support. The chipset supports Google Android, Windows Mobile, and Ubuntu Linux and can handle Adobe Flash.

YOTA ALSO NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO WIMAX?!

In a major blow to WiMax proponents, Yota, one of the world’s top WiMAX operators serving five Russian cities, said Friday that it decided to develop LTE, not WiMAX, reports the Moscow Times.

Yota is one the largest WiMAX network in the world, says Wikipedia. As of 2010, Yota had 350,000 subscribers, increasing by 3,000 customers per day.

Yota now plans to spend $100 million on an LTE rollout in five Russian cities this year. Their total investments is estimated at up to $2 billion.

The first city to get LTE will be Kazan, followed by Novosibirsk and Samara. Yota plans to launch LTE in Moscow and St. Petersburg at the end of 2011.

The company, founded in 2007, currently operates in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Sochi and Krasnodar. It is also active in Belarus, Peru and Nicaragua.

Yota had planned to launch WiMax in 15 more Russian cities, which will instead receive LTE service. The company will use the same 2.5-2.7 GHz frequency band in which its WiMax networks currently operate.

“Yota is a services company; for us technology is an instrument. It’s clear that the LTE standard is becoming the main trend in wireless communications,” chief executive Denis Sverdlov said a statement on the company’s web site.

According to Robert Syputa, senior strategic analyst with Maravedis, “It remains to be seen if WiMAX momentum will continue in India and North America. We now forecast that Clearwire will shift at least part of their deployments to LTE by the end of 2011.”

Why the push for TD-LTE? TD-LTE and FDD-LTE are interoperable. You can roam across them. WiMAX, on the other hand, is potentially cheaper, can use unlicensed bands, works for backhaul and is upwardly compatible with 100 Mbps 802.16m.

Samsung provides WiMAX base stations to Yota in Nicaragua and Belarus. Yota also has strategic partnerships with Intel, HTC, Cisco, Sequans and ASUS. Samsung’s U-RAS Flexible base stations can be used as a common platform for Mobile WiMAX (802.16e), Mobile WiMAX 2 (802.16m), as well as both FDD-LTE and TD-LTE deployments.

The Yota LTE plan will likely throw a monkey wrench into Clear’s roaming agreement with the big three WiMAX operators, Yota (in Russia), UQ (in Japan) and Clear (in the United States).

Deployed WiMAX networks include:.

• Clearwire, founded by cellular phone pioneer Craig McCaw in October 2003, continues to expect to cover up to 120 million people with its 4G network by the end of 2010. It ended the first quarter of 2010 with 971,000 total subscribers.
• Korea Telecom now covers more than half of the Korean population. KT launched the world’s first commercial Mobile WiMAX system in South Korea, June 2006.
• Japan’s UQ Communications now covers more than half of Japan’s population, offering services to consumers via more than 20 MVNO partners.
• Malaysia’s Packet One Networks, which celebrated its first anniversary of operations this year, has reached 130,000 subscribers.
• Freedom4 received the green light to offer fully mobile WiMAX services in the UK using its nationwide 3.6GHz spectrum, but big growth is expected after the 2.6 GHz auction.
• Wateen launched Pakistan’s huge WiMAX network covering 22 cities.

4GCounts reported 4.73 million BWA/WiMAX subscribers being served by over 200 operators worldwide at the end of Q3 2009.

The WiMAX Forum says that emerging markets such as India and China are its best bet. But India’s Broadband Auction has just begun (after finishing the 3G auction), and bids on the two, 20 MHz slots available in the country are now facing competition from TD-LTE backer Qualcomm.

Germany’s spectrum auction in the 2.6 GHz band will open up some 190 MHz for “4G” broadband wireless. Germany’s auction included two 20 MHz slots totaling some 40 GHz, and some 140 GHz devoted to paired LTE for cellular carriers.

This 2.6 GHz spectrum road map is now expected to be followed by most of the countries of the world for their “4G” auctions.

But if the 50 MHz chunk of unpaired (TDD) 2.6 GHz spectrum goes to TD-LTE, then it could be curtains for WiMAX technology as a major global force.

China Mobile – the world’s largest mobile carrier with over 508 million customers and China Telecom, the country’s third-placed operator are both interested in carrying Apple’s iPad. China Unicom, the 2nd largest mobile carrier, is currently the exclusive iPad carrier. China developed TD-SCDMA and is expected to favor TD-LTE as a “4G” technology.

Global WiMAX subscriptions are expected to grow from nearly 5 million today to 92.3 million in 2015, according to 4G Trends. LTE subscribers are expected to hit 200 million by 2015, according to Maravedis.

Today there are 5 billion mobile subscribers across the globe. The top 25 mobile operators accounted for almost 22 percent of those subscribers, or 1 billion people. Cellular operators are overwhelmingly committed to LTE.

SPRINT GOES TO LTE

Sprint, which owns 51% of WiMAX operator Clear, is weighing whether to migrate to LTE on part of its own CDMA networks, reports Light Reading Mobile.

At the LTE Summit in Amsterdam, Kevin Packingham (left), SVP of product and technology development for Sprint, said the operator was doing a technology evaluation and has sent out an RFP.

Packingham wasn’t dismissing WiMax: “We don’t see WiMax and LTE as being mutually exclusive,” he said.

Light Reading indicated that Sprint’s RFP is for its CDMA networks at 1900 MHz and 800 MHz, though the majority of Sprint’s CDMA networks are in the PCS band. So instead of identifying new spectrum for a 4G network it would look to upgrade or overlay LTE in its existing 2G and 3G bands.

CDMA carriers are only 1.25 MHz wide, so it will have to take several offline before it can aggregate the spectrum for a much broader LTE carrier. With no dominant voice standard for LTE, a voice handset using the LTE data network may take a while to reach the market. Currently Verizon and AT&T plan to use their 700MHz LTE frequencies as a data-only network. Voice will be carried on their traditional cellular network.

AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile all are backing LTE, so it makes sense for Sprint to support the standard, too, and provide seamless roaming on the paired cellular spectrum. But until voice is carried on LTE, there doesn’t appear to be an overwhelming need.

Sprint’s data-centric WiMAX network has bandwidth to burn. Clear has previously stated a willingness to provide whatever technology the market wants – even to other carriers. That may serve Sprint well, since the 2.6 GHz band is the spectrum of choice for “4G” providers world-wide — and Sprint/Clear owns 90% of that spectrum in the United States.

Clear is installing Samsung U-RAS Flexible base stations, which can be used as a common platform for 802.16e, 802.16m, as well as both FDD-LTE and TD-LTE deployments, as well as Motorola’s LTE/WiMAX solutions and Huawei basestations that allow TDD-WiMAX, TDD-LTE or FDD-LTE with a simple board swap.

According to Light Reading, Packingham would not specify a timeframe for when Sprint might make a leap to LTE. He suggested, however, that such a decision would be informed by customer reaction to the EVO 4G WiMax smartphone, which will be released on June 4, as well as an understanding of what work needs to be done at standards bodies to make a technology shift possible in its frequency bands.

MIMO

3G Americas, a wireless industry trade association representing GSM cellular technologies, today announced that it has published an educational white paper titled, “MIMO and Smart Antennas for 3G and 4G Wireless Systems” (pdf) The report is a tutorial reference document that outlines smart antenna schemes for improving the capacity and coverage.

The term smart antennas (Wikipedia) refers to adaptive array antennas that can follow relatively slow-varying traffic patterns; intelligent antennas, which can form beams aimed at particular users or steer nulls to reduce interference; and MIMO antenna schemes, predominately featured in LTE and WiMAX systems.

MIMO systems use multiple transmit and receive data paths for faster data throughput and/or link range. Beamforming is a key component of the time division duplex (TDD) versions of 3GPP LTE (TD-LTE) and WiMAX 802.16e specifications. Frequency Division Duplex (FDD), used by Verizon and AT&T in the 700 MHz band, would be impractical since it would require twice as many antenna components and much larger client devices.

The white paper was created by a 3G Americas technical work group and concentrates on the practical aspects of antennas and their deployment for 3G and 4G wireless systems, specifically downlink antenna techniques available in 3GPP LTE Release 8.

Some of the areas addressed in the paper include:

• Peak data rates tend to be proportional to the number of send and receive antennas, so 4X4 MIMO is theoretically capable of twice the peak data rates as 2X2 MIMO systems. For another example, in upgrading from HSPA (1X2) to LTE (2X2) a gain of 1.6x is seen (Rysavy Research, 2009).
• The practical tradeoffs of performance with the realistic constraints on the types of antennas that can be realistically installed, cognizant of zoning, wind loading, size, weight and cabling challenges and constraints from legacy terminals and other equipment.
• 3GPP Release 8 of the LTE standard supports MIMO antenna configurations. This includes Single-User (SU-MIMO) protocols using either Open Loop or Closed-Loop modes as well as Transmit Diversity and MU-MIMO. Closed-Loop MIMO mode, which supports the highest peak data rates, is likely to be the most commonly used scheme in early deployments. However, this Closed-Loop MIMO scheme provides the best performance only when the channel information is accurate, when there is a rich multipath environment and is appropriate in low mobility environments such as with fixed terminals or those used at pedestrian speeds.

At 700 MHz, a 2X2 configuration (two transmitters and two receivers) is most common. A 2X4 configuration is preferred at higher frequencies between 1900 MHz and 2600 MHz. At 2300 MHz, an 8X8 installation for TDD-LTE is expected to be widely deployed.

Beamforming and adaptive arrays in the 700MHz band seem unlikely. There simply isn’t room for multiple very large antennas per sector. They’d also create excessive wind load. Most LTE and WiMAX deployments will be in the 2.3, 2.6 and 3.5 GHz bands. Less size. More bandwidth.

Huawei’s green basestations increase the efficiency 30%, says the company, with a smooth evolution to WiMAX 16m, with 100Mbps in each sector, using only software upgrades and board swaps. Motorola says WiMAX can eliminate air-conditioned equipment sheds, reducing construction costs 35 percent and power 60 percent (pdf).

Yankee Group projects about 50 million WiMAX subs by 2014. Juniper Research predicts 100 million LTE subs by 2014, a figure that matches an earlier Maravedis projection of WiMAX subscribers by 2014. Cumulative (3G + 4G) wireless broadband subs are expected to exceed 2 billion world-wide by 2014.

An Intel whitepaper (pdf) claims WiMAX technology is more spectrally efficient than HSPA or LTE. The report compares Mobile WiMAX with HSPA, HSPA+, and LTE. Intel says WiMAX can handle more subscribers per cell site with higher QOS.

According Intel’s report, WiMAX is able to support 20 video streaming users per sector at 256 kbps, using a 10MHz channel, compared to 12 users at 128 kbps on an HSPA network. Furthermore, WiMAX networks are able to support a large number of users even with high monthly data usage of 12GB per subscriber.

Meanwhile, Rysavy Research white papers (pdf) shows another look at relative spectrum efficiency. It was created by cellular-centric 3G Americas’ members and compares 5+5 MHz for UMTS-HSPA/LTE and CDMA2000, with 10 MHz DL/UL=29:18 TDD for WiMAX.

The above chart does not include WiMAX Release 2 (802.16m) which has a spectral efficiency of 2.6 bits/sec/Hz, which would be higher than LTE.

WiMAX Release 2 (802.16m) will use 4X2 MIMO in urban microcells, in a single 20 MHz TDD channel. The WiMAX Forum expects to see WiMAX Release 2 available commercially in 2011-2012. Beceem and Sequans make TD-LTE and 16m chips for dongles.

Japan’s UQ Communications with more than 300,000 WiMAX subscribers by the end of the 2009, plans several million subscribers in the coming years with coverage of more than 90% of the Japanese population by 2012. UQ Communications says it has installed 7,013 WiMAX base stations in 447 municipalities and in 111 train stations operated by East Japan Railway Company.

UQ Communications features NEC’s Mobile PasoWings base stations with ArrayComm A-MASTM multi-antenna signal processing software. ArrayComm is a world leader in Multi-Antenna Signal processing that combines MIMO, beamforming, and interference cancellation.

Samsung and Yota are now testing 802.16m.

Clearwire, UQ, and Yota offer WiMAX roaming between countries, providing their users with 4G access when abroad.

The three companies will also be among the first to move to 802.16m (WiMAX 2.0), which utilizes 4×4 MIMO and 20 MHz wide channels to deliver 120 Mbps mobile service.

Cisco sponsored studies (right), found WiMAX Operators could cut network costs in half by using beamforming systems (pdf). Azimuth Systems, a leading provider of wireless testing solutions, offers a series of beamforming seminars.

Verizon Wireless’ LTE network will operate in the 700 MHz band using 10 MHz radio channels, with a spectral efficiency of 1.5 bps/Hz. That means LTE can deliver a sector throughput of 15 Mbps — but it must be shared by some 30 users in a sector. Clearwire says that the average subscriber is now using about 7 GB per month.

That’s a problem for 700 MHz LTE. Demand is likely to exceed their 20 MHz capacity (10 MHz x 2) — which means data caps and higher costs for LTE. Don’t plan on a telephone hotspot option (now available on Sprint’s $199 EVO 4G phone). LTE phones won’t be available for at least a year, and any mobile hotspot option would likely cost more than $30/month.

Clearwire has up to 120 MHz of spectrum available – four to six times the capacity that Verizon or AT&T have on 700MHz. In addition, WiMAX 2.0 should deliver average downlink speeds in excess of 100Mbps per sector by this time next year using 20 MHz in each of three sectors. That’s another 2-3 times the capacity & speed – and it will be backwards compatible with their current WiMAX network.

Samsung’s new U-RAS Flexible base station will be used by Clearwire this year. It supports 802.16e, 802.16m, as well as both FDD-LTE and TD-LTE deployments.

Even cellphones are now used more for data than for calls. In a data-driven world, FDD broadband wireless is a waste of space. TD-LTE brings BWA inside the cellco tent. That’s why cellular companies like it.

It’s high noon in Boston. The city will soon have a shootout between Verizon’s LTE and Clear’s WiMAX. But consumers are agnostic.