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Mobile & Wireless
Rival Operator Pours Scorn on Sprint Nextel’s ‘4G’ Plans
3G Operator Claims Running Start
by Iain Morris
'Invest and conquer' seems to be the strategy of the WiMAX sponsors.
Sprint Nextel, the third largest wireless operator
in the US, recently announced one of the biggest WiMAX ventures of all
time: a $3 billion investment to roll out a nationwide network.
And, not to be outdone, chipmaker Intel raised the stakes by saying it was prepared to invest billions of
dollars in European wireless companies rolling out WiMAX networks.
And, not to be outdone, chipmaker Intel raised the stakes by saying it was prepared to invest billions of dollars
in European wireless companies rolling out WiMAX networks.
“We will do whatever is necessary to make WiMAX wireless
broadband ubiquitous on a global scale,” said Ashish Patel,
managing director for Intel Capital in Western Europe.
Sprint’s network will use the 802.16e ‘mobile’ WiMAX
standard, which – unlike the commercially available ‘fixed’
version (802.16d) – will permit users to roam between base
stations. Although, at the moment, ‘mobile’
WiMAX exists
only in the shape of pre-certified, proprietary solutions, the certified standard is being touted as a
future competitor to 3G in certain quarters.
But there has been a rather cool reaction in some parts of the
industry to what would appear to be such hot news stories.
Jay Saw, manager of public WLAN with T-Mobile, is
unimpressed by the WiMAX challenge to established mobile
technologies like HSDPA. “To be honest, 3G is years ahead in
terms of rollout and there is no great advantage in rolling out
another network when HSDPA will deliver pretty impressive
speeds.”
T-Mobile, he says, sees WiMAX purely as an effective
backhaul technology in certain circumstances and remains
unconvinced of the business case for city-wide
deployments. “WiMAX will require a massive amount of
investment and, even though manufacturers are talking
about how far it goes, we believe it will require far more
antennas and rooftop sites than is being predicted.”
The chances of WiMAX’s success outside the States are even
slimmer, says Saw. Signals from rooftop antennas may not
easily permeate to ground level unless streets are designed
on a more deployment-friendly US-style grid system. “So if
you want WiMAX for individuals carrying handhelds you would
need to build it at street level,” he explains. That would
require even more infrastructure and could significantly drive
up the costs of rollout.
And because of WiMAX’s poor in-building coverage, Saw does
not believe that such urban deployments will pose a threat to
public hotspots – such as Starbucks cafés – that use WiFi
technology. “At the moment, WiMAX doesn’t go through glass
at all well. It will only travel a few feet beyond the windows,
and that doesn’t really suit people’s needs.”
James Person, chief operating officer of the CDMA
Development Group (CDG), a lobby group for CDMA
operators, agrees that Sprint will struggle to set WiMAX up as
a contender to 3G. “CDMA2000 already has the spectrum,
the ‘ecosystem’ of the manufacturers, the standards in place
and it’s commercially available. WiMAX still has a long way to
go, not only in terms of developing the standard and getting
mobility to work but also in terms of handset development,
infrastructure and spectrum allocation.”
UK-based NGN operator Thus has been just as
critical. “Throwing money at a raw technology can create waste
and is inefficient,” it said in a statement released on
Tuesday. According to Falk Bleyl, senior product manager at
Thus, there is a note of desperation in Intel’s latest
pitch. “Intel really has a vested interest in getting WiMAX
adopted – and as much as possible – because it’s already
made such a heavy investment in it.”
Bleyl believes ‘the jury is still out’ on whether the sort of
blanket rollout of WiMAX planned by Sprint is economically
feasible. “We’re not saying that WiMAX isn’t appropriate in
any shape or form,” says Bleyl. “But we are dubious about
deployment in areas where there are possibly more mature,
more cost-effective ways of connecting customers already.”
WiMAX could succeed, he says, as a substitute for DSL or fiber-based last mile access
in rural and remote areas, where not only are the
deployment costs far less than those of digging fiber connections
but there is less likely to be spectrum interference because
there are fewer users.
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