If you are an Indian BWA licensee with a brand new 2.3GHz spectrum license you acquired in the recent auctions, then you are struck by the quandary of the situation: which technology to choose for your network, LTE or Wimax? This decision can be life-changing for an operator, one wrong move and you could find yourself on a Wimax island with an unproven future or you end up waiting for ever for your LTE network to arrive in good shape.
Consider this: a typical Indian multi-circle BWA license winner would be targeting to cover, say - a 200 million population base. Assuming the operator is satisfied to penetrate less than 10% of the addressable base, this could be about 6-7 million in 4-5 year period. Assuming reasonable level of coverage, the operator may have to invest in about 7500 base stations. If the operator moves ahead with a $200 million investment commitment and picks Wimax to immediately harness his 20MHz spectrum, there is only one question that could bother him while he is busy signing up customers: what is my migration path for the future, how do I get to the promised land called LTE?
The option to getting stuck on Wimax is to consider TD-LTE instead of Wimax, but there are a number of other irritants: somewhat incomplete solution as of now, eco-system richness or lack of it, weak choice of infrastructure vendor, higher equipment cost, uncertain device availability and even lack of a reasonable level of awareness about the product / technology and solution capabilities. So BWA licensees are faced with a rather poor choice by being forced to pick the immediately available one or sit on the fence to wait for the supposedly ‘better’ one.
But vendor Beceem's new BCSi500 LTE/Wimax Single Chip solution will end the quandary by allowing BWA licensees to enjoy the benefits of deploying Wimax now while having the security of being able to upgrade to TD-LTE later. A complete Wimax eco-system is ready today with USB dongles in the $30-$40 range and CPEs with voice support for $50- $60, and an equally broad array of core network infrastructure.
These BWA operators can consider a move to LTE by 2012 to early 2013, when TD-LTE hopefully will begin to stabilize. By then, the standard promises to deliver the performance specified in its standards, and begin to scale and build volume-economics that makes it a feasible option to enter emerging markets such as India.
The infrastructure available from all leading Wimax vendors in 2010 is already upgradable to LTE, but devices were considered to be tied to either Wimax or LTE. So at this point an operator may have a few million Wimax devices that would be expensive to replace just in order to upgrade the network to LTE. But devices powered by the Beceem chips will not have this problem.
If an operator switches off its Wimax network in favor of LTE, BCSi500 based devices will be able to connect to the LTE network as if nothing happened. In the interim they can roam seamlessly between parts of the network that are still using Wimax and parts of the network that are already upgraded to LTE. Now this allows the BWA operators to have their cake and eat it to, meaning they can benefit from the immediate availability of low-cost and high-performance 4G Wimax solutions while maintaining the option of upgrading to 4G-LTE at the time when it is ready and affordable, and comes with a large number of devices and phones.
Sounds like an irresistible sweet spot? Yes. Too good to be true? May be, time will tell. Radio network engineering, many believe is a ‘science’ that borders on ‘art’. Irrespective of vendor claims, network enhancement is seldom seamless especially over multiple radio technologies. Will infrastructure vendors guarantee ‘software upgrades’ to 802.16e infrastructure to LTE? If it is not ‘seamless’ then who would bear the costs and how high would it be?
The average Indian consumer clearly doesn’t care whether his device will be Wimax or TD-LTE, but he most certainly cares about his total cost of service – device included - and what broadband experience can he be assured of. And the BWA operator needs to know that he is not being tied down to a single technology, that he has the ability to pick the best from both Wimax and LTE in order to maximize his return on the premium he paid for the tech-neutral BWA spectrum.
By thinking ahead of the curve, Beceem has made life simpler for BWA operators and has stolen a march over competition. Only devices built on such Wimax/LTE integrated combo Silicon will allow the rickshaw driver in Kolkata to seamlessly drive through winding roads not missing a single wicket of the Indian cricket match today. And tomorrow, when his operator switches channels to LTE, his game isn’t over...
Sridhar T. Pai, ceo and founder of Tonse Telecom covers wireless markets from Bangalore.