WiMAX wins one convert, awaits more

The WiMAX community late last week was still anxiously awaiting any indication from Sprint that it plans to deploy the technology. That carrier's commitment to the technology has been viewed by many people involved with WiMAX as something that could help make or break the burgeoning segment's prospects for advancement in the U.S.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of an agreement between Sprint and Motorola to co-develop and test a Mobile WiMAX system, but Sprint also has been actively testing other alternative technologies to determine the role they may play in the company's mobile broadband evolution. The carriers have been planning to reach a technology decision sometime this summer, and a Sprint spokesman said in an e-mail to Telephony last week that the timeline hasn't changed.

“Our evaluations of 4G candidate technologies are still under way,” he said. “Flarion [the company, now owned by Qualcomm, behind Flash-OFDM technology], IP Wireless [the company providing Sprint with TD-CDMA technology] and WiMAX [being provided by Motorola] are some that we are assessing along with W-CDMA and multi-carrier [EV-DO Rev. B].”

While Sprint continues to mull its options, WiMAX, in the meantime, recently gained what appears to be a much stronger endorsement from another major service provider whose plans for the technology had been in question.

Clearwire, the broadband wireless juggernaut founded by Craig McCaw and serving almost 30 markets nationwide, took in a $600 million investment from Intel and a $300 million investment from Motorola and made a separate deal to sell its network equipment vendor subsidiary, NextNet Wireless, to Motorola, which will evolve the firm's gear to adapt to WiMAX standards. The investment from two WiMAX champions and the sale to Motorola all but guarantee that WiMAX is firmly planted on Clearwire's technology road map.

“It's going to change things dramatically because before the deal, Clearwire was committed to WiMAX in a distant sort of way,” said Monica Paolini, president and founder of Senza Fili Consulting. “There has been uncertainty about which way Clearwire would be going.”

An official at a WiMAX Forum member company told Telephony in recent days that WiMAX needs to see firmer deployment commitments from U.S. service providers as the WiMAX Forum's upcoming Mobile WiMAX certification program is poised to test equipment in the 2.5 GHz and 2.3 GHz frequency ranges. The 2.5 GHz spectrum band likely will be for WiMAX deployment by Clearwire and Sprint in particular, as they are the two largest owners of 2.5 GHz spectrum. BellSouth currently owns and operates markets using both frequencies.

“It's getting to the point where we need to know what's happening with this technology, whether or not somebody like Sprint is going to deploy it and who else will deploy it,” the source said. “It can't just be Intel and a few of us others creating all the momentum.”

That official declined to be identified, citing the sensitivity of those remarks to the overall WiMAX effort — an effort about which the source added, “I think this thing [WiMAX] is going to be big, and it's a technology with tremendous benefits.”

Meanwhile, the WiMAX Forum, which held its quarterly members meeting in San Diego last week, continues to stoke the fires of interest in Mobile WiMAX. In a Webcast, several officials from forum member companies outlined the claims of a recent forum white paper, “Mobile WiMAX: A Performance and Comparative Study,” which argues how the technology provides better performance than 3G options.

“Most cellular systems are [frame division duplex], which is a symmetric technology and fine for cellular voice, but most data applications are asymmetric in nature,” said Siavash Alamouti, a fellow in the company's mobility group at Intel. “[Time division duplex]-based WiMAX allows for a simpler bandwidth allocation for those data applications.”

Zeev Roth, chief technology officer for Alvarion, added that WiMAx Forum tests have shown that Mobile WiMAX, with multiple input/multiple output technology, provides three times more throughput than mobile high-speed uplink or downlink packet access or CDMA EV-DO Revision B, while even Mobile WiMAX with a single input/multiple output architecture still show substantial improvement.