Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Tuesday 12 February 2008, 5:09 PM
WiMAX still begins with a Why
The imposing man at the Nortel stand looked similarly confused when we asked, but we couldn't tell whether this was because he didn't know either, was only fluent in words of more than two syllables, or couldn't quite believe the inanity of the question.
Fortunately, I'm bilingual. I tried again. "We'd like to expand on your vision of the interoperability paradigm, vis-a-vis mixed-carrier infrastructure for low-latency integrated voice and multimedia broadband services."
Aha! Go and see the other man, over there.
The other man looked annoyed. He knew why we were there. He knew what we were going to ask. He knew what he was going to say. Let the ritual commence.
As it happened, he had a vignette to show us first. This vignette - his word - was spread over three desks, one disguised as an internet coffee shop, one as an estate agent, and one as a seller of villas. He took us through a scenario, where a rich man (in the coffee shop) wanted to buy a villa. Rich man found an advert on the internet, and connected to a Voip system using his handset and the shopīs wi-fi. Nortelīs magic managed system promptly set up three-way calls, streamed live video from the villa in question, and got the villa salesman to FTP (yes, FTP) more pictures over.
You, me and the girl next door may see a few holes in that, and telco services have rarely set the world on fire (go on, name one thatīs been invented and successful in the past ten years), but thatīs Nortelīs business and who are we to criticise.
But WiMAX? Why? That was being a broadband IP pipe, nothing more, nothing less. The big diagram Nortel showed us of how everything hung together had a nice cloud of WiMAX, but a nice cloud of anything could have done the job. WiMAX, explained the second Nortello, was fast and cheap to install. LTE wasnīt even here yet. "You could call it Long Time Evolving".
Itīs just as here as WiMAX in the UK, we said (Freedom4īs sterling efforts to irradiate Droylesden, Moss Side, Rusholme, Longford, Mode Wheel Road, and Cheetham Hill notwithstanding). Well, the auctionīs this summer, said the man.
Long time to wait to buy a villa, we thought.
Itīs still really hard to see much money in European WiMAX, fine technology though it is, because in general thereīs nothing it can do that other systems, already in place, cannot. There are exceptions, but not enough. Mobile WiMAX is a different story - or will be - but then, LTE is firmly in that window too.
I know that lots of people have spent lots of money on WiMAX and are very keen to spend more. But looking over the well-stocked graveyard of wireless data companies I still think I see a pit unfilled - and thereīs no need to fill it. We will have fast mobile data at some point, and a bit of sanity now will save a lot of pain later. If Bluetooth can grow to encompass multiple radio standards to do different jobs, then WiMAX can join with LTE and everyone can push forward.
This may not be the year for expensive battles.
PreviousComments on this post
VOIP turned your computer into a phone, now VOIP-over-WiMAX wants to turn your phone into a phone with-in a phone? very interesting..
It makes sense if your goal is to save money on international calls. But then the scenario doesn't hold; the Rich Man can afford a villa but can't afford direct phone calls? or do you need VOIP to stream live video?
I was talking to a consultant at MWC who's involved in network planning for LTE, and who's also deeply into that side of things on 3G. I asked him whether he thought LTE and WiMAX would merge. "No", he said. "Won't happen." And why not? "WiMAX will be dead before then". He was of the opinion that Intel and pals had decided long ago that WiMAX would be the next Wi-Fi, but hadn't realised that telecoms standards are a lot harder to push through than networking standards - the ITU is nowhere near as manipulable as the IEEE system, for lots of reasons. That came as a nasty surprise, he said, and the standard has been on the back foot ever since.
He also threw in the fact that networks aren't building out any more, they're consolidating (operators sharing networks were rare beasts just a couple of years ago, now it's becoming almost standard) and the closer 4G will be to existing systems the more likely it is to happen.
Even given his natural bias, I found those arguments attractive. It wouldn't be the first time American communications companies completely misjudged how the rest of the world works, nor the first time that a non-telco company venturing into telco-hood gets eaten by lions.
(He also had some very cogent things to say about femtocells and how they cause all sorts of logistical problems. To simplify horrendously; when you bung a few femtocells on the network, they look to the network occupancy planning software like quite a major chunk of new capacity - which means they trigger spending on backhaul out of proportion to the revenue they'll bring. This is surprisingly difficult to resolve sensibly, because of the way the contracts between suppliers and operators work. I'll be digging around that one too over the next few months.)
