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Last week at the ITU conference in Geneva, the WiMAX Forum said there are currently between 8 and 10 million WiMax users worldwide. We believe these numbers are inaccurate based on our direct tracking of WiMAX subscriber uptake among the top 200 operators worldwide. We estimate the number to be closer to 3 million, and that's including subscribers using pre-wimax systems. The 4GCounts Q2 2009 Quarterly Report will be published next week as part of our 4GCounts.com service. WIMAX is on the offensive again after taking a beating in recent months due to the hype generated by the LTE camp. AT the ITU conference in Geneva last week, the WiMAX Forum, along with WiMAX advocates including Alvarion, Beceem, Cisco, Clearwire, Huawei, Intel, KT, Samsung, UQC, Yota, and ZTE, announced the endorsement of IEEE's submission to ITU-R that proposes an IEEE 802.16m-based candidate for IMT-Advanced 4G standards. The WiMAX Forum also announced that it will finalize its WiMAX Release 2 specification in parallel with IEEE 802.16m and IMT-Advanced, ensuring that WiMAX Release 2 networks and devices will remain backward compatible with the legacy WiMAX Release 1 based on IEEE 802.16e. The developing 802.16m standard offers new capabilities and efficiencies to meet the IMT-Advanced requirements. The IEEE's IMT-Advanced proposal documents that, according to the ITU-R's rigorous definition reflecting aggregate throughput delivered to multiple users in a practical deployment, using 4X2 MIMO in the urban microcell scenario with only a single 20 MHz TDD channel available system wide, the 802.16m system can support both 120 Mbit/s downlink and 60 Mbit/s uplink per site simultaneously. Higher data rates can be obtained with additional spectrum resources or more complex antenna schemes. The WiMAX Release 2 profile will also incorporate these capabilities for improved VoIP capacity, spectral efficiency, latency, handover speed, cell range, and coverage, with support for wider operating bandwidth in both TDD and FDD duplexing. The WiMAX Forum expects to see WiMAX Release 2 available commercially in the 2011-2012 timeframe. The upcoming versions of both 802.16m WiMAXm and LTE-Advanced are designed to meet the same guidelines for IMT-Advanced which calls for an adaptive framework that can be used from local area fixed networks to large scale mobile networks, and to use multiple carriers across multiple bands of spectrum. Without getting into details, it is important to view both WiMAX and LTE as headed to become the 'Swiss Army knives' of wireless. Should they merge? They are already on the path to convergence at many levels. LTE stems from the mobile industry’s 3rd Generation Partnership Project, 3GPP, and also has support from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2, 3GPP2, which includes Qualcomm. Although a next generation wireless network has been in consideration for several years, many suppliers, including leading integrated network supplier Ericsson, as well as several operators, have questioned the need to develop or deploy any next generation network, since they consider 3G to have a 10-15 year life cycle. Last week, Samsung and Yota announced their commencement of a WiMAX 2.0 equipment trial, which is based on the IEEE 802.16m standard – the next-generation path to WiMAX that boosts data speeds. The companies expect the equipment to operate up to four times faster than the current generation of WiMAX products, which are based on the IEEE 802.16e standard. Yota plans to put the first WiMAX 2.0 units into service by the end of next year, demonstrating once again that it has become a leader in pursuing new devices and applications for WiMAX, ahead of longer-established Greenfield operators. The WiMAX community is in dire need of reviving the excitement around the technology, and more importantly, laying out a clear roadmap for WiMAX operators deploying 802.16e today, who are becoming increasingly nervous of LTE advancements and starting looking for exit strategies. Indeed, according to a Tier 1 vendor, an increasing number of WiMAX operators are issuing RFIs for compatibility between 802.16e and LTE.
Enjoy! Adlane Fellah For more information, contact the author at afellah@maravedis-bwa.com |
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