Wimax fights LTE shutout

John C. Tanner
12 Jun 2009
00:00

Time to market: overrated
Certainly the LTE camp is predictably unimpressed with Wimax's head start in the wireless broadband space, effectively dismissing the "window of opportunity" advantage as irrelevant.

"Time-to-market does not equal success," says Dan Warren, director of technology at the GSM Association, arguing that GSM's history and footprint gives LTE "two equally important things that Wimax lacks -pedigree and a pre-existing ecosystem."

On the other hand, the same is less true for the early-adopter market partly responsible for driving LTE's accelerated development - many of them cellcos who happened to be outside of the typical W-CDMA cellco demographic, and thus have an incentive to push on to 4G sooner rather than later.

"CDMA operators like Verizon and KDDI are in a hurry to deploy LTE because they are stuck on a one-way street with EV-DO," says Bo Ribbing, strategic marketing director for Ericsson. "China Mobile has TD-SCDMA and wants to move quickly to TD-LTE.

And TeliaSonera, which was the first to sign an LTE contract, is sharing its HSPA network with someone else and wants their own network."

For most W-CDMA cellcos, though, LTE isn't an immediate concern, with many currently not planning to deploy LTE for another two or three years. Some are also still considering the interim step of HSPA+, which boosts data speeds to 21 Mbps, although vendors like Motorola counsel against this.

"The window of opportunity for HSPA+ is only one and a half years, so we recommend to operators to go sooner rather than later to LTE because of the benefits of lower TCO, faster time to market and you can better meet mass-market traffic-revenue challenges at a lower cost per bit," says Daisy Lam, senior marketing manager of wireless broadband technologies for the Home & Networks Mobility division of Motorola Asia Pacific.

So far, only a handful of cellcos have adopted HSPA+, but one such cellco - Hong Kong CSL - swears by it.
"HSPA+ has a lot of life in it because everyone is scaling back their capex, and LTE is a costly upgrade," says CSL's chief technology officer Christian Daigneault. "LTE will come, but you need a hell of a lot of spectrum if you're going to achieve the 120 Mbps they're promising."

It's also worth noting that CSL itself has plenty of spectrum to play with - 900 MHz, 1800 MHz (for which it has two licenses), 21. GHz and its newly-awarded 2.6 GHz. And it's using new software-defined radio (SDR) base stations supplied by ZTE to refarm and reuse spectrum across all of its frequency bands.

"The regulatory environment in Hong Kong allows us to refarm spectrum however we like based on market trends and technology, which gives us much more flexible use of our capacity," Daigneault says.

LTE base stations will have the same capability, and that's a potential advantage over Wimax, which so far has typically been allocated single frequency bands, in markets where it operates.

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