Low-power showdown

The WiMAX industry still may have a long way to go to make chipsets cheap enough before they'll wind up in everyday consumer electronics, but as far as power consumption is concerned, WiMAX is doing just fine. Research Group WiMAX 2020 conducted the WiMAX Low Power CPE Shootout last month at WiMAX World to gauge whether WiMAX chipset vendors really could meet their claims of low-power mobile technology. The vendors — at least the two that participated — passed with flying colors.

WiMAX 2020 decided to benchmark WiMAX offerings against current 3G solutions under the assumption that initial expectations will demand that WiMAX devices at least match the power profiles of smartphones, said Haig Sarkissian, analyst and Shootout moderator for WiMAX 2020. WiMAX 2020 set a benchmark of six hours of voice time and six hours of Internet browsing as benchmarks — one hour better in both categories than the iPhone, which routinely outperforms other smartphones in power consumption.

GCT, submitting a USB dongle embedded with its chipset, managed to meet the voice benchmark and exceed the data benchmark by an hour. Altair Semiconductor, which submitted a digital circuit board because its chipset is not embedded in any commercial products yet, far surpassed the benchmarks, achieving 9.5 hours of voice-over-IP talk time and more than 14 hours of Internet usage.

Sarkissian said the differences between the two vendors' chipsets are mainly in development. GCT is supplying silicon for commercial products today, which primarily encompasses independent customer premises equipment with external power sources, while Altair is focusing on the future embedded market, which requires ultra-low-power solutions, and has designed its platform specifically to meet those requirements. The fact that both vendors are meeting these benchmarks today, however, is significant, he said.

“We are where we need to be compared to 3G,” Sarkissian said. “We're even ahead. The difference is 3G works for six hours but gives you a low bit rate. The WiMAX solutions are working for six hours but at a much higher bit rate. In that sense, we're far ahead.”

TESTING BATTERY LIFE OVER WIMAX

WiMAX 2020 tested GCT and Altair's WiMAX chipsets to see if they could match a six-hour benchmark for power consumption common to 3G. Here is how they performed:

Source: WiMAX 2020