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Broadband Access
Nortel Continues to Bang WiMAX Drum
Claims Cost and Capacity Advantages over 4G Rivals
by Iain Morris
Greenfield operators worldwide have the opportunity to disrupt
the mobile market with WiMAX, claims Nortel, stealing a
march on rivals betting exclusively on other 4G technologies.
Peter MacKinnon, general manager of Nortel’s WiMAX
business, who has been showcasing Nortel’s products at the
Broadband World Forum in Paris this week, is dismissive of
the short-term threat posed by competitors to WiMAX,
including LTE as well as EV-DO Revision C.
“The jury’s out on when you’ll have an ecosystem to support
LTE, but I’d say that could be 2009,” says MacKinnon. “WiMAX
has a two-year advantage.”
EV-DO faces a similar time-to-market disadvantage, claims
MacKinnon, which gives WiMAX an opportunity to be disruptive
before those technologies are commercially available.
However, he acknowledges that WiMAX still had hurdles to
overcome, especially in European countries, where spectrum
in the 2.3GHz and 2.5GHz bands -- the most suitable for
WiMAX deployments -- is currently reserved for use with 3GPP
technologies.
“What we’re looking at initially in Europe is 3.5GHz, which
does require more base stations,” says MacKinnon. “But in
the UK, the 2.5GHz spectrum auction is coming up and that
will be an interesting space to monitor.”
Nortel is hoping for a technology-agnostic approach, whereby
governments allocate the spectrum and the market players
decide how best to use it. In the US, Sprint is rolling out its
network using lower spectrum bands and claiming the costs of
implementation are just 10 percent those of deploying a 3G
network.
They are also significantly less than deployments of WiMAX
using an older, single antenna technology, says MacKinnon.
Nortel is pioneering the development of multiple antennae or
MIMO base stations, which are being showcased in Paris this
week, and insists that as well as cost advantages these will
deliver massive improvements over rival, single antenna
systems.
“They offer three times the capacity and so the throughput is
increased,” says MacKinnon.
Those capacity and cost benefits will be passed on to
consumers, thinks MacKinnon, and could provide the
necessary spark that ignites the broadband mobile market
worldwide.
“3G has struggled because there needs to be a compelling
application and a way to deliver it cost-effectively,” says
MacKinnon. “The studies we’ve done show it’s not designed
for that. People don’t want to spend another £10 or £20 a
month on these things. 10 percent is an order of magnitude
reduction, and there’s no reason why you can’t pass a lot of
that to end users.”
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