WiMAX A Worldwide Winner?

Before I get started, let me reiterate by doubts about WiMAX, especially Mobile WiMAX. I do not consider WiMAX to be a 4G technology, and I do not see a substantial increase in data speeds or capacity when WiMAX is compared to other wireless technologies in use today. I believe the WiMAX community is over-hyping the technology and its capabilities and that this will come back to haunt them in the next year or so.

Having said that, I do not discount the idea that WiMAX has its place and will be successful in providing some types of wireless access in some markets. However, WiMAX poses no threat to existing wireless networks or services and is caught in a crunch between deployed technologies and newer technologies such as LTE (Long Term Evolution) and 802.20 that are less than five years from being commercialized.

Intel is spending an enormous amount of money promoting WiMAX because, like Wi-Fi today, it wants WiMAX for its chipsets. Intel came to the wireless party late and wants a mainstream technology that it can influence -- GSM, UMTS and CDMA are "owned" by others. When it was first conceived, WiMAX was to be a technology free of intellectual property rights and royalty fees, but it has gone the way of WCDMA. When Ericsson, NEC and NTT DoCoMo began work on Wideband CDMA (WCDMA), it, too, was to be a rights-free technology; one specification was that WCDMA could not infringe on any existing intellectual property. In the end, it took the incorporation of other companies and their technologies (intellectual property) for WCDMA to become commercially viable.

Sprint was the hit of WiMAX World, having announced that it will roll out WiMAX in its 2.5-GHz spectrum to become the largest entity in the world so far to incorporate Mobile WiMAX in its wireless strategy. Intel and the rest of the show's attendees hailed the Sprint decision as a milestone in the advancement of WiMAX Mobile. It could, indeed, be considered as such.

Comments from Intel's executive vice president Sean Maloney and Sprints chief technology officer and president of the mobile broadband group Barry West were that consumer devices with embedded chipsets will drive the market for WiMAX systems. According to Wireless Week, West said that when other carriers or wannabe service providers reach out to the consumer market down the road, the value will not be there for embedding a second chipset. Further, if these carriers do succeed in getting a second chipset added, they will pay a higher price to make it happen.

I think this is flawed logic. Today's notebooks already have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and, in some cases, UMTS/HSDPA or CDMA2000 1xEV-DO built into them. Handsets have four or more built-in technologies on four to six frequency bands and Sprint is talking about offering wireless devices that have CDMA, iDEN, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi built in. And Intel's track record isn't that great. After Wi-Fi was being built into laptop computers, Intel offered a chipset that included Wi-Fi, and even though it was a Bluetooth promoter, it never did offer a chipset that included Bluetooth. Notebook companies had to get that chipset from someone else.

I guess I am missing something. Are they saying that WiMAX will be the only technology built into a consumer product? WiMAX will provide coverage to much of the United States, but not all, and perhaps many other parts of the world. According to Scott Richardson, vice-president of the mobility group at Intel, "Whoever owns the lamppost wins." Apparently, he believes that over time WiMAX mobile will replace Wi-Fi as the favorite municipal wireless technology. But on what spectrum? Licensed, unlicensed, 2.3, 2.5, 3.5, 5.8 or a band to be named later? How about the "white noise channels" between TV stations that is unlicensed or licensed 700-MHz spectrum? Just how many different bands will the Intel chipsets support? Last I heard, Intel will limit support to licensed spectrum in the 2.5 and 3.5-GHz bands and unlicensed spectrum in the high-power portion of the 5-GHz band. Has something changed?

Will consumer companies need additional chipsets in their devices to provide WiMAX services on the other bands? How does that play into Barry West's thoughts that only a single chipset will be built into consumer devices? And while I am on that subject, if I were a consumer electronics company and I had a choice of an Intel/WiMAX chipset that provided WiMAX-only service capabilities or a chipset that could provide wireless access over GSM/UMTS/CDMA/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth and whatever is next (including WiMAX), which chipset would I buy? There is no contest. If I were making navigation systems that mounted on a car's dashboard and wanted to include a wireless chipset to provide real-time traffic reporting services, would I choose a WiMAX chipset or a chipset that enables consumers to subscribe to any one of four or five nationwide wide-area networks?

If I were Apple and wanted to wirelessly enable my iPODs, would I choose a chipset that works only over Sprint and Clearwire WiMAX systems in the United States, or would I choose one that gave my customers a choice of networks? If I wanted a single wireless device that provides music, video and voice, would I go with a WiMAX service provider such as Sprint or would I want an EV-DO-and-voice provider such as Sprint? If the Sprint EV-DO network covers most of the populated United States, and its WiMAX service covers about half of that, which service would I choose?

WiMAX may be the answer for data services in rural areas of the United States and other parts of the world. Access to the Internet for everyone should have a high priority and, since WiMAX is supposedly less expensive to deploy than other technologies available today, there might be a return on investment from providing rural access to broadband services.

What I gathered from the reports and conversations about WiMAX World is that WiMAX will be a really big deal for wireless broadband. It will become the de facto standard for wireless connectivity in the consumer device world, and consumer companies won't build in more than one wireless solution: WiMAX. Does anyone remember when Intel pushed for Bluetooth and then walked away from it, its investment in Cometa and its delay in adding 802.11g and 802.11a to its chipsets?

I forgot to remind everyone in the beginning of this commentary that voice pays the bills. Do Intel and others really believe that consumer devices without voice capability will convert the world to WiMAX? WiMAX does support VoIP, but will it be better than Wi-Fi, UMTS/HSPDA and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Rev A?

Voice still produces more than 90% of wireless revenue and the number of voice phones dwarfs the number of notebook computers on this planet. Voice phones (with data capabilities) fit into your pocket and last days on a single battery charge. Exactly what consumer devices do Intel and Sprint envision that will contain a WiMAX wireless chipset, and what services will be delivered via those devices? Will the services be truly mobile? Will WiMAX provide coverage in and out of doors? Will it be capable of voice calls to anywhere in the world? Moreover, will Intel WiMAX chipsets be the only chipsets embedded into consumer devices?

I, for one, do not buy into this vision of the WiMAX future!

Andrew M. Seybold

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