Market heating up for broadband wireless equipment, SRT debuts offering

The next-generation broadband wireless equipment market is beginning to heat up and two Canadian companies are at the forefront of emerging developments. Late last month Wi-LAN Inc. unveiled its Mobilis gear (RoW, Nov. 4/04) and on November 3 Montreal-based SR Telecom Inc. introduced its symmetry product line, both of which contain key ingredients of the 802.16e draft standard. Wi-LAN is trialing the mobile wireless broadband equipment in a Korean transportation application, which the company says demonstrates multi-megabit broad-band throughput rates can be attained at high vehicular speeds. SR Telecom has chosen to use the pending mobile broadband standard in a fixed setting, saying that’s where the real demand and utility is. The two equipment manufacturers agree that this new emerging technology holds great promise in providing valuable broadband access. But their respective opinions diverge when talk shifts to the impact of 802.16e on third-generation wireless and the large equipment makers like Nortel Networks Corp. and Ericsson. In interview with Report on Wireless last month, Sisso El-Hamamsy, president and CEO of Wi-LAN, said the introduction of the Mobilis gear should put a scare into the larger equipment manufacturers for two reasons. First, the equipment should serve as a warning to companies looking at 3G for next-generation mobile wireless. Secondly, Wi-LAN has a big lead in terms of equipment on the market. "This is for a very particular application, but it’s a precursor (of things to come)," El-Hamamsy says of the company’s latest product offering, adding that it could throw a wrench into the value proposition of 3G down the road, but that at this stage it doesn’t. "It shows that at least from the physics of OFDM transmission and communications at high-speed in these environments is feasible and it also shows that IP is capable of doing seamless handoff very, very fast and without losing data. I would say these are a couple of very scary things," he explains. El-Hamamsy adds that the larger equipment vendors are more than likely developing gear based on this yet-to-be certified standard, but with aggressive product release time frames three years out and conservative ones six years away, Wi-LAN has a significant lead. "If their eyes and ears are open, I certainly think this is going to cause them to rethink a lot of plans," he tells Report on Wireless. The introduction of Mobilis also sends a couple of messages to the market, El-Hamamsy says. First, it shows that the standard for fixed broadband wireless services is equally suited for a mobile environment, and "the second message is to the large companies that this technology is coming down the pipe faster than they think." SR Telecom’s strategic marketing director Chad Pralle doesn’t agree at all with El-Hamamsy’s assessment of the impact of 802.16e on the large equipment vendors. He says the large vendors are looking at the technology, but aren’t worried. "They’re not worried about (802.16e) taking over their mobility space. They’re looking at it. They certainly have the capability to buy companies if they need to get into the space. But I think it’s like this: there will be some companies, some carriers, which will decide to use WiMAX for mobility, and certainly there will be carriers which will use 3G for mobility, but in the short term where WiMAX is really going to provide capability that is lacking is in a rural and underserved access market for fixed broadband. "Consumers around the world have become more dependent on high throughput and the jury is still out about how valuable mobility broadband is. So WiMAX is really targeted at delivering throughput to subscribers with mobility as a secondary thing whereas 3G is mobility and we’ll try to get you the data as soon as possible," Pralle tells RoW. Pralle doesn’t think the 802.16e draft standard, expected to be approved sometime in 2006, will have too great of an impact on 3G. While there is potential overlap in the types of applications and services that could be provided over the two network standards, he says networks based on the two protocols are really for different purposes. "I don’t think WiMAX has called (3G) into question. I think it was called into question all on its own. Eventually people will be carrying around devices getting broadband in a mobile way. The question is how quickly are consumers going to need that. It’s really almost a user paradigm shift more than it is a technology thing. I think you need the right kinds of devices and WiMAX can certainly help that along," Pralle explains. symmetry deployment slated for next year SR Telecom is working with Spanish telephone company Telefonica on building out a large scale deployment of the symmetry gear, which will begin early next year. The operator ordered 450 base stations that will be deployed throughout the Spanish countryside to provide service to 100,000 people living in rural areas. Pralle has high hopes for the symmetry product line, and is pretty confident based on his experience with OFDM and broadband wireless that the product will do well. He was instrumental in developing the angel product family at AT&T Wireless, a line of broadband wireless gear that was acquired by SR Telecom. He says the magic to the symmetry product is the breadth of markets it can serve. "The secret to the symmetry platform is it’s a cost-effective OFDM broadband solution for residential, SOHO and small business whereas most of the broadband wireless (equipment) you’ve seen, especially the OFDM stuff to date from vendors, has been focused on the SME because it’s expensive. We’re actually on our fifth generation of OFDM equipment now, so we really know how to make it cost effective. In fact, we’re seeing successful business cases from subscriber ARPUs at $40." A lot of numbers have been bandied about on the cost of deploying this latest equipment and the expectation is that it will be significantly less expensive than other broadband gear. Mitch Vine, product manager at Redline Communications, told RoW in an interview earlier this year that deployment costs could drop to as low as $200 per subscriber to build out a network to cover Ottawa (RoW, Jan. 27/04). Vine expects the cost of WiMAX equipment to mirror prices currently charged for Wi-Fi-based gear within the next couple of years. "The pricing of 802.16 will converge on the kind of pricing people expect with 802.11, where they are paying a couple of hundred dollars per subscriber or less," he says. Pralle says it’s not right to compare Wi-Fi to WiMAX. "A lot of people are comparing the future growth of WiMAX to the historical growth of Wi-Fi, and at SR Telecom, we feel that it is a very unrealistic goal because for Wi-Fi it’s a lot of little decisions, it’s a lot of consumers deciding to spend a couple of hundred dollars to make their house wireless. But in WiMAX, it’s a very small number of very big decisions. It’s carriers around the world deciding to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars of new equipment into their network and that’s a very different thing. WiMAX is not Wi-Fi on steroids regardless of what people tell you," he explains.

Market heating up for broadband wireless equipment, SRT debuts offering

News | 11/19/2004 5:00 am EST

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