Bell CTOs: WiMAX lacks spectrum

LAS VEGAS--Spectrum and standardization issues are keeping WiMAX off the deployment schedule of the Bell companies, their CTOs agreed at a Monday Telecom ’05 panel discussion.

While Qwest Communications is planning WiMAX trials next year, CTO Balan Nair agreed with his counterparts that no major carrier is going to press forward on the WiMAX front until it’s clear what spectrum will be available in the U.S.

“There’s a lot of WiMAX equipment built for 3.5 GHz, but what good does that do in the U.S.?” he said. “Some folks own spectrum at 700 MHz and are willing to license it, but you don’t have the economies of scale that make the CPE affordable. You can’t put tunable radios on chips for multiple frequencies because it will cost too much.”

Europe is moving forward because it has the 3.5 GHz spectrum and can.

BellSouth owns MMDS and WCS spectrum, and will focus its exploratory efforts there, said CTO Bill Smith. “But it’s hard to start building something on the expectation of spectrum. We have a lot of opportunities to invest capital that are more certain.”

Verizon hasn’t found the need for WiMAX, said Mark Wegleitner, senior vice president of technology and CTO. “What does it replace?” he questioned.

There were other major points of agreement as well for the four men, which included Chris Rice, executive vice president of network planning & engineering and CTO of SBC. Some of the highlights were:

• The push to converge on IP will create new reliability demands that could exceed today’s 99.999% reliability standard, said Smith. “When you have all your services on one network and you lose that network, you lose everything,” he said. “Five nines is the bare minimum.”
• IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) is the next big change, but still needs a lot of work, all four agreed. SBC will deploy IMS for VoIP next year, then migrate its other applications, said Rice. “IMS needs to be expanded to handle data and video,” Wegleitner commented.
• There are critical decisions to be made around whether to use gateways and other devices to “IMS enable” legacy circuit switches or just replace those switches. “Its not a simple question to answer,” Smith said. “You prolong their life but also their cost structure.”