Alcatel: The Overachiever

This article is part four of a six-part online series that culminates with a final analysis feature in Oct. 9 issue of Telephony. The other parts in this series can be found on our WiMAX World page.

If WiMAX were a science fair, Alcatel is striving to take first place. It doesn’t just want the ribbon and the pat on the back, it wants to run away with the prize, creating the perfect project that judges will moon over while the rest of the kids shuffle awkwardly in front of their paper-mache volcanoes and electromagnets. Alcatel is striving to create the perfect base station.

Alcatel isn’t one of those vendors that hopped into the WiMAX game lately. It and a handful of others have been behind WiMAX from the beginning, spending years fine-tuning their prototypes, waiting for the day that the technology goes commercial. Consequently Alcatel has added a lot of bells and whistles to its WiMAX architecture--ranging from beamforming to a scalable software defined radio platform—and has grounded that architecture firmly in its other access portfolio. After all that work, Alcatel is finally ready to submit its project to the judges and collect the prize it feels its do.

“We’re beyond the evangelical stage,” said Mike Seymour, Alcatel’s vice president of broadband access in North America. “Now we have to make sure this works. We have to go execute our solution.”

Alcatel’s WiMAX strategy is centered on its Evolium software defined radio base station, a modular architecture that incorporates all possible configurations of WiMAX into a single box. While other vendors are creating specific base stations to meet different WiMAX deployment scenarios—a kit for 2.3 GHz with 8.5 MHz channels would be completely distinct from a kit at 3.5 GHz using 10 MHz channels—Alcatel’s magic box does it all. Instead of having circuits paths laid out permanently in silicon, Evolium’s baseband radio is pure code: software that defines that the specific RF configuration and modulation scheme of each deployment. Evolium not only supports every flavor of WiMAX but Alcatel’s other radio access technologies too, from GSM to UMTS.

The other technology advantage Alcatel claims to have is expertise in the smart antenna technology beamforming. Beamforming uses multiple antennas to generate multiple signals, which are then merged into one concentrated beam to the end user. The technology expands capacity to the individual user and the overall radius of a given cell. But while optimal for maintaining a link with a stationary or slow-moving user, the knock on beamforming is it doesn’t support true mobility. Many vendors have included beamforming technologies into their kits, but because of the industry’s current obsession with mobility, most manufacturers are focusing their efforts on another smart antenna technology, Multiple Input/Multiple Output or MIMO. As its name implies MIMO also uses multiple antennas, but instead of using those dual or quadruple signals to generate one focused beam, each signal runs in parallel and is received and interpreted independently by the end device. The technology not only has the capacity advantages of the beamforming and because it uses multiple signal paths, which can bounce off objects like buildings, it is ideally suited for highly mobile situations and dense urban environments—the sweet spot most of the big vendors are aiming for.

While Alcatel’s championing of beamforming may seem odd in the current environment, that outlook might be explained by Alcatel’s seemingly contrary view to the marketplace. While many of its Tier I brethren are focusing narrowly on mobility, Alcatel acknowledges the opportunity for Mobile WiMAX as a fixed broadband or portable broadband technology, either for wireline carriers trying to augment their own DSL networks—many of which are built by Alcatel—or for regional or national broadband deployments in developing markets, markets where Alcatel just has happened to have built a strong business with GSM.

“Alcatel is pretty unique in the mobile radio business in that a lot of our business is in developing countries,” Seymour said. “We do a lot of turnkey solutions in India, Africa and Russia.”

Alcatel is certainly investing in MIMO also, and Seymour said it is targeting the second wave of Mobile WiMAX certification this summer. And due its software defined radio architecture, that MIMO component would require only a software upgrade to base station and new antenna mast on the tower. But Alcatel could get a lot of mileage out of beamforming, especially if its technology is as far along as it claims.

While the IEEE 802.11e standard and WiMAX certification profiles limit just how much fiddling any vendor can do with different beamforming modes, vendors still have a lot of mathematical leeway within those modes. The airlink pilot structures of those mode are governed by complex algorithms, and the vendor with the better algorithm gets the better performing equipment, said Lars Johnsson, Beceem’s vice president of business development and one of Flarion’s co-founder.

“It is fair to say that not all beams are formed equal,” Johnsson said.

Alcatel also claims have produced a lot of other technical advantages in its labs such as a scalable orthogonal frequency Division multiplexing architecture, but a lot of those innovations aren’t enhancements of existing WiMAX technology’s but rather implementations necessary to support its modular base station architecture. As a standardized technology, WiMAX’s migration path is laid out clearly and several vendors have acknowledged that vendors will be distinguishing themselves through their portfolios and scale rather than their technology.

Alcatel’s advantage seem to lie not in the fact that it has different technology, but rather that it can mix and match technologies in a single platform. Carriers, for instance, can deploy its beamforming solution today and add MIMO at a later date with a software upgrade, Seymour said. They could even deploy a UMTS network on the same equipment if they so chose, Seymour added. Though few carriers are likely to do the latter, they are given a lot of versatility. But putting that kind versatility and functionality on a single base station is costly, Seymour acknowledged. Alcatel’s magic base stations won’t come as cheaply as a striped down base station designed for a specific type of rollout.

“There’s definitely a trade-off to building a future-proof network,” Seymour said.

Alcatel, however, needs to worry about getting its equipment in networks today before it can worry about future proofing them. So far Alcatel has been in a lot of trials—10 by its count—but it has yet to land a single commercial contract. Alcatel has been considered a leader in WiMAX, but its recent sluggishness compared to the big deals revealed by Motorola and Samsung may have changed that outlook, said Peter Jarich, wireless infrastructure analyst with the Current Analysis. While ultimately the announced WiMAX deals are few compared to the potential deals out there, but mind share is important in this business, Jarich said.

“It’s too early for anyone to have fallen behind, but at this early stage people are looking for tealeaves pointing anywhere,” Jarich said. “If you’re perceived as being an early market leader, it might help you get a deal in the near term. It snowballs from there.”