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Saturday, December 11, 2010
ALPHIMAX 3D WIRELESS TOOL
Monday, June 7, 2010
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.
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
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.
