Coming soon: WiMAX the home, perhaps

By Stuart Corner
Sunday, 23 July 2006 11:30

Technology

Announcement of a partnership between UK chip developer, picoChip and Korea Telecom has opened up the possibility of WiMAX access points supplanting WiFi for wireless communications in the home. The two companies have formed a partnership  to develop home-base stations, otherwise know as 'femtocells' conforming to the mobile WiMAX standard IEEE 802.16e-2005 and tis Korean variant, WiBro, which KT is now using to launch a commercial network in Korea. However,  Korean carriers and manufacturers have global aspirations for the technology.

(femto is the SI prefix denoting 10-15 and next in the scale down from the more familiar micro, nano and pico. Should technology produce even smaller base stations, the SI system has three further prefixes available: atto, zepto and yocto.)

According to picoChip, "Femtocells are small, low-cost base stations, intended to be used in residential or corporate environments where high-speed coverage would otherwise be limited. By enabling cost-effective deployment they allow carriers to complete with UMA or voice-over-WiFi."

picoChip claims that the femtocell concept is increasingly being recognised in the 3G community, but as the carrier most advanced in deploying WiBro, KT is the first to develop such a program for WiMAX. "WiBro, the South Korean wireless telecommunications standard, is compatible with WiMAX 802.16e-2005 (mobile WiMAX), and aims to be the technology that delivers personal broadband to consumers around the globe."

The picoChip/KT partnership will focus on picoChip's recently introduced PC20x family of processors, claimed to "deliver the best MIPS per dollar of any signal processor and [to] enable a single chip WiMAX BS PHY with integrated ARM for upper layer protocols."