This week we are releasing the latest 4GCounts quarterly report, which provides WiMAX operator statistics for the full year 2008. The report also puts into perspective the challenges and opportunities for WiMAX in light of LTE’s recent progress.

Approximately 1.45 million BWA/WiMAX subscribers worldwide were added in 2008, while the WCDMA subscriber base increased by more than 90 million. The average quarter-over-quarter subscriber growth rate in 2008 was 21.5%.

WiMAX’s best promise remains in the hands of Clearwire. The first “Clear” Mobile WiMAX market was Portland, where the subscriber uptake in the first two months more than doubled any of Clearwire’s prior 47 market launches. Clearwire closed the year 2008 with 475,000 subscribers (all of them using the proprietary equipment). The new Clearwire plans to launch WiMAX networks in 80 US markets including 75% of the top 50 markets.

2008 was a difficult year for most WiMAX vendors, which accelerated both market consolidation and niche specialization in order to survive the downturn. By the end of the year, the number of mobile WiMAX Forum certified products based on the IEEE 802.16e-2005 standard for mobile broadband was over 23. The WiMAX Forum has set a goal of 1,000 product certifications by the end of 2011. Certifications for mobile WiMAX products are occurring over multiple profiles that vary by frequency band, duplexing scheme, and channel size. The ideal frequency bands in terms of propagation for 802.16e-2005 operators are the 2.5GHz and 2.3 GHz bands, however, in March 2009 two new 3.5GHz frequency band products obtained WiMAX Forum certification; they consisted in two base stations from the companies Alcatel-Lucent and Alvarion. The radios at 3.5 GHz are mostly for use in fixed and stationary wireless applications due to signal propagation. Some vendors contend that 802.16e-2005 is a better protocol technically than 802.16-2004, but we believe that systems built on 802.16-2004 still have some life left in them.

The financial crisis affected the deployment plans of many operators, increased the sales cycle and increased the risk perception towards WiMAX in 2008. We saw also major vendors abandoning, selling or restructuring their WiMAX business divisions. Vendors such as Nortel, Nokia, Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent, were some of the vendors that changed their WiMAX business strategies, either exiting the market altogether or refocusing their R&D spending towards LTE.

As demand for mobile broadband continues to grow, we are seeing great operator interest in LTE because it can deliver data at a lower cost per bit. In fact a recent Maravedis study found that among the top 22 WiMAX operators, 42% are considering or planning to deploy LTE. Networks have been dominated so far by standalone CPEs as well PC peripherals such as USB dongles and PC cards. Embedded multimode devices are only emerging in the last few months thanks to operators such as Scartel.

On the other side, while LTE networks are yet to become commercial, vendors have stepped up availability of the prerequisite network planning tools, test and measurement systems. Multi-mode ICs and LTE devices are scheduled to become available starting latter in 2009. Progress has been made both on 3G-LTE systems and on the next generation LTE-Advanced version.

THIS QUARTER’S SUMMARY FINDINGS:

• The Middle East and Africa was the fastest growing region for WiMAX in 2008.
• Operators generated ARPUs of US$43.8 from the residential segment, and US$122 from the business segment across regions.
• The number of base station sectors deployed during Q4 2008 totaled 138,162; an increase of 14% from 121,269 deployed during the previous quarter.
• Operators have faced various problems when deploying their base stations, including a lack of capacity.
• One of the largest deployments we expect in terms of numbers of CPEs and base stations sectors installed is BSNL (India).

Enjoy!
Adlane Fellah
Maravedis CEO & Founder