i ON AMERICA

Somewhere between the hype of 3G and the overnight success of Wi-Fi, amid the unpredictability of a newly elected president in South Korea and rising political tension with the country's northern neighbor, lies i-Burst.

It seems like the i-Burst wireless data solution and its creator, San Jose, Calif.-based ArrayComm, are always in the shadow of other technologies, companies and events. The small vendor of smart antenna products, often lost among the names of mobile industry giants, first had the gall to launch an alternative wireless data network concept just when the rest of the industry was pinning all its hopes on 3G. The platform leveraged ArrayComm's Intellicell antenna technology operating in the 2.3 GHz spectrum band to produce data transmission speeds of at least 1 Mb/s.

That announcement and ArrayComm's initial demonstrations of the technology came more than two years ago. The company then went overseas to begin testing its data network concept. After a trial in Australia culminated in success last year, ArrayComm more recently announced just weeks into the Year of Wi-Fi that it had successfully tested i-Burst with Korea Telecom.

Testing, which took place over several months with the South Korean telco, also involved Korean vendor LG Electronics and base station manufacturer Kyocera. The trial partners used two field test sites (one in a densely populated urban community and the other in a rural environment) to prove the wide-area data speed, range, network scalability and capacity.

Most significantly, the companies successfully tested seamless hand offs between the i-Burst network facilities and a Wi-Fi hot spot network operated by KT, as well as interoperability with the telco's existing DSL and voice-over-IP services. That kind of seamless operation with existing wireless and wireline broadband access technologies can only help ArrayComm plead i-Burst's case to the rest of the world.

“Wi-Fi network operators have contacted us about the potential of doing that [wide-area hand off to i-Burst from wireless LANs],” said Nitin Shah, chief strategy officer for ArrayComm. “Wi-Fi is becoming the cost ideal for wireless data, but service providers using it will have to provide service continuity to a paying customer, rather than requiring them to go sniffing around for hot spots.”

Korea's KT, which calls its Wi-Fi service Nespot, was intent on making this kind of leap in wireless data network connectivity. Deok-Rae Lim, vice president of KT's service deployment laboratory, said in a statement that the operator expects substantial growth from its wireless wide-area data business “in the 2.3 GHz frequency band, in combination with our wireless LAN-based Nespot service.” He added that KT was impressed with i-Burst's ability to hand off from the wide area to local area and that the carrier sees the technology as a potential broadband alternative to DSL in areas DSL can't reach.

ArrayComm's Shah said that an even more significant argument of the i-Burst architecture's viability, as well as its advantages over pure wireless LAN or 3G deployments, lies in the spectral efficiency it demonstrated in the KT trial.

Using the inherent channel reuse capability of its Intellicell solution, which is based on spatial division multiplexing, ArrayComm was able to show KT how the same frequency could be reused multiple times for different subscribers. “The spectral efficiency is the key because that is the money you are investing as a network operator,” Shah said. “People too often confuse low barrier to market entry with competitive advantage. Wi-Fi is experiencing huge commoditization, but i-Burst has spectral efficiency and carrier-grade reliability. The signal with Wi-Fi hot spots is small and there is little to regulate someone else from using your signal.”

Still, Shah said ArrayComm understands the need to integrate with the upstart wireless data standard. “Wi-Fi is very much part of the broadband landscape. You can't ignore it.”

He said the vendor and some of its partners are looking at how Wi-Fi chips could be integrated at a low cost into an i-Burst modem. “The modem could detect which network was available. If you were out of range of the Wi-Fi signal, it could switch to i-Burst,” he said.

Shah also said ArrayComm is working on improved security capability for i-Burst, but short of that effort, there is no other major technology milestone the system hasn't met. As ArrayComm continues to test i-Burst with KT, it will engage in more of a “trial of the business model. We'll be adding more base stations and users, working with KT on developing the cost model, and getting the system before the highest-level deployment decision makers within KT,” Shah said.

At the same time, ArrayComm is working with KT and South Korean regulators to ensure that rights to the country's 2.3 GHz frequency band — which currently is allocated for the all-but-dead fixed wireless voice telephony market — is re-allocated for i-Burst. Shah said all indications are that it will be, which will save the vendor from pursuing the risky investment maneuver it undertook as part of its first trial in Australia.

Prior to that trial, ArrayComm bought unlicensed 2.3 GHz spectrum for use by the consortium of companies working on its technology test. “That's how we stepped past any regulatory issues,” Shah said.

The Australia trial was more of a lab-oriented trial, as opposed to the dual-field tests occurring in the two different communities in South Korea. However, Shah said it provided ArrayComm with important information about how the technology worked, which it was able to share with KT to accelerate implementation of the second trial.

ArrayComm is now talking with European network operators about testing the technology. Shah said he is typically spending the early hours of his workday on developments in Asia, and the later hours of the day on Europe. In between, of course, he is talking to U.S. network operators that, like the Europeans, have yet to try i-Burst.

“If you are a U.S. carrier that is serious about deploying wireless data, then I want to work with you,” Shah said. “I want those carriers to see what we have done in Australia and Korea, and see that this works.”