MWC: Beceem looking to play with the big boys in LTE

No longer satisfied with WiMax alone, Beceem Communications has fallen under the allure of long-term evolution. The WiMax chipset maker is set to announce its first LTE product at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, hoping to transplant its success in one 4G technology to another.

Beceem vice president of business development Lars Johnsson said Beceem isn’t taking the much bigger LTE chipset market head on—at least not yet. Rather Beceem is producing a dual-mode WiMax-LTE chipset targeting device makers looking to encapsulate all 4G connectivity in a single device.The chipset won’t just be dual-mode, it will support both time-division duplexing (TDD) and frequency division duplexing (FDD), channel sizes up to 20 MHz, seamless hand-off between radio technologies and the plethora of different 4G bands available globally. Combined, those capabilities make it the chipset for any flavor of 4G, Johnsson said. 

“A TDD user on Clearwire could seamlessly roam on to Verizon’s FDD LTE network if the two were on a friendly terms,” Johnsson said. “We view this is a way of uniting the two technologies.”

Johnsson acknowledged that dual-mode WiMax-LTE will be a much smaller market than the market for LTE only, but he said Beceem’s customers have already expressed interest in that capability. Many countries have both WiMAX and LTE networks either running or planned. Some operators will be interested in supporting roaming between the two types of networks, and some device vendors will be interested in building a single product that works on both standards for those markets, Johnsson said. He also pointed out that many WiMax operators like Clearwire haven’t ruled out migrating to LTE in the future.

But Beceem’s ultimate goal is to break into the lucrative LTE market, which would pit the small chipset maker against some of the largest silicon companies in the world, Johnsson said. Considering the size of that task, Beceem is starting slow, putting a stake in the ground with a dual-mode offering, where the competition is primarily with other small vendors such as Sequans Communications and Wavesat. If it can prove successful in that niche market, Beceem can take a stab at the larger LTE-only silicon market, Johnsson said.

“We’re not thinking now about competing with Sequans or GCT, but about taking market share from ST-Ericsson and Qualcomm,” Johnsson said.

Beceem hasn’t revealed its total WiMax shipments for 2009, but in September it said it had shipped 2 million chipsets in the first three quarters of the year and was on target to reach 3 million by year end. Beceem estimated at the time it had 65% to 75% of the mobile WiMax (based on the IEEE 802.16e standard) device chip market.