Between April 11-13, Taipei became the WiMAX showcase for Asia as WiMAX Forum Asia Congress ran its annual regional meet here. The congress brought together the entire eco-system from chipset vendors to the Test and Certification labs, prominent WiMAX operators in the region, equipment vendors, and application developers. Amidst lush green paddy fields and misty tea growing mountain slopes, one cannot miss how beautiful Taiwan has balanced phenomenal technology leadership while maintaining its rich culture, as well as traditional agrarian economy. Several points to highlight from this event are summarized in the following report.

Important government support:

• Taiwan government is a staunch promoter of wireless broadband technology and has successfully demonstrated how government encouragement and support can turn a technology vision into reality. From the early days of  MTaiwan Project to current proliferation of a half a dozen WiMAX licensees, Taiwan has repeatedly pushed ahead with a liberalized regime of unleashing wireless broadband power. For a country that already has reasonable level of broadband penetration, WiMAX has come in as a timely aid to assist in furthering wireless broadband usage.

• During the event, we had the opportunity of travelling in local cabs fitted with WiMAX enabled terminals that were continuously connected to the Net as the cabs whizzed through the city. There were about 1500 WiMAX ready cabs around the city and one could access mails and pick up any information on the fly.

• A demonstration of WiMAX coverage and robustness became reality as we sat in the metro connected to You Tube through a WiMAX USB dongle to our laptops, downloading video files cruising at 120kms per hour. No disconnects, no failures, and rarely slow, this was ample evidence that with proper coverage and capacity dimensioning this network would deliver the goods.

Operators are expanding:

• VeeMAX Telecom, a full-fledged mobile WiMAX network service operator, started life in May 2007 securing a 2.5GHz license for North Taiwan with a 30MHz spectrum and raising USD 60mil capital. Thus, VeeMAX became one of the six licensees to operate WiMAX services in the Taiwan region. Beginning with Taipei metropolitan area, VeeMAX has already rolled out multi-vendor Samsung and Alvarion networks in 2009 to go live with real services. This year, VeeMAX has already differentiated its services significantly by covering a taxi fleet of over 1500 cars with WiMAX enabled terminals built-in. Operator is currently addressing a population of about 4.8 million.  

• Vee Telecom is another licensee of WiMAX spectrum that is operational for the South Taiwan region with 30MHz channel in 2.660GHz band. Vee has a differentiated strategy with a suite of VAS, including IPTV video addressing a population base of over 12 million. The operator has an existing business of video and content which it is using to build out its subscriber base over WiMAX. Moreover, the operator has developed significant expertise in video content delivery and has successfully launched time-shifted TV, unlimited video viewing, and personalized video blogs for retail users. For specific verticals such as law enforcement and security, VeeTime [service brand] has introduced WiMAX enabled police mobile surveillance. This was a very impressive demonstration of a police surveillance van that is able of shoot real time video on its drive through the city and to push large video frames into the Control Room, thereby significantly enhancing communication between its own officers and HQ.

Device ASP getting attractive:

• Another key observation is that the USB dongle device average selling price has already breached a USD35-40 barrier. This is welcome news especially as one considers emerging market opportunities, since in many of these markets device pricing can be an initial barrier. Most impressive is the overall time frame in which these price levels have been reached, which is relatively small compared to traditional access device pricing in earlier generations, such as ADSL / Fixed WiMAX / and even GSM devices. Historically large scale penetration has been noticed when access device pricing breaches USD 20, which might not be too far into the future.

• Also noticed at this event was the large variety of dual band Wi-Fi WiMAX access devices, VoIP enabled WiMAX devices, multi-port Access points, a variety of cool application specific devices such as WiMAX enabled Surveillance camera, and so on. One of the observations from North American market has been that the WiMAX-only device may not be such as great idea as regions with low coverage may leave users frustrated with the sudden carrier loss experience. A fall-back to Wi-Fi or even to a cellular data option is preferred as it guarantees connectivity though at a reduced rate.

• MIMO USB Dongles now available ensure far superior connectivity and signal penetration via walled apartments, are in most service providers’ offerings.

Consolidation at Infrastructure Supplier layer:

• Noticeable amongst the key trends was the level of consolidation at the infrastructure layer; with several large RAN players either having exited the space or merged with other players over the last year. One of the strong transformations under way in the telecom sector is the way large telecom equipment players are becoming Managed Services players (such as Ericsson, AL LU and NSN); with an increasing part of their revenues coming from services business versus hardware / equipment sales. We have not noticed such trends in WiMAX infrastructure play so far, but should not be surprised if it becomes dominant as operators are bound to move away from capex-heavy network expansions.

Chip-set volumes growing:

• 802.16e mobile WiMAX chipset shipments have soared significantly as volumes exceeded 1 million chips /quarter for Beceem alone back in Sep 2009. Since then, volume shipments have grown further by compelling device form factors / pricing by large and small OEM / ODMs in Taiwan and elsewhere. Thus, WiMAX has transgressed into mainstream territory and is now a viable wide-area wireless broadband solution for those that want to deploy today.

Open Retail Initiative:

• WiMAX Forum’s Open Retail Initiative, a major effort to bring in plug-and-play connectivity to a variety of third party access devices in a WiMAX network thus breaking the operator-driven device limitations, was launched at the Congress on April 12. It defines a set of processes, features and testing cases that ensures end user devices can be sold to consumers via any retail store, and allows end users to activate the services without any help from service providers. The Open Retail Certification initiative is designed to test WiMAX devices in an end-to-end network IOT environment with common test requirements accepted by WiMAX operators around the globe.

With increasing momentum building up in the global mobile broadband arena, and important spectrum auctions under-way in multiple markets across the globe, it is certainly an exciting time. We will continue to track these sectors to bring you current analysis and unveil trends as they happen.

For more information, contact the author at stpai@tonsetelecom.com

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