Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
Follow the Australian Telecommunications scene NEWSLETTER- FREE TRIAL Blog
Technology news and Jobs 
Cornered! The things we could do with the Opel WiMAX network, if....
Cornered! The things we could do with the Opel WiMAX network, if.... | The things we could do with the Opel WiMAX network, if.... |
|
| by Stuart Corner | |
| Friday, 22 June 2007 | |
|
Page 2 of 3 The man in charge of that project, Sprint president of 4G, Barry West, delivered a keynote address to the FierceMarkets WiMAX Strategies conference, held in the US as part of NXTcomm. And it was reported that "he laid out specifics on Sprint's business model for WiMAX, but by not-too-subtle inference he was telling the entire telecom industry the model they must adopt for WiMAX to be successful." Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
One thing he did say showed why comparisons between HSDPA and WiMAX can be so misleading. "His fundamental premise was that WiMAX isn't inherently a technology with a superior cost-per-bit advantage, but rather one with a superior cost-per-dollar-of-capital spent," NXTcomm daily reported. "WiMAX's wide swathes of spectrum allow carriers to deploy ten times the capacity over the same infrastructure, he said. If launching over 1.25MHz channels, 5MHz channels, you must still use the same base station, tower and support facilities. By launching over a 20MHz channel, WiMAX efficiency comes in the sheer volume of capacity that can be achieved over the same physical infrastructure, West said." We do not yet know for sure either the frequency or the bandwidth that Opel intends to use. West also identified mobility, which 802.16d does not support, as key for WiMAX "This is not another voice network. This network is about mobilising the Internet. That's probably the most important statement that I will make today," he was reported as saying. He also contended that the business model should be very different from that adopted for mobile services today. "The types of consumer devices Mobile WiMAX will support - laptops, portable media players, digital cameras - will be attractive enough to consumers without carriers kicking in to pay for them," he was reported saying. "Once consumers buy their electronics they'll seek out the network in order to utilise the full-functionality of their new purchases, but if carriers start locking them to high-priced contracts or limiting what services they use or how they access the network -which is how cellular carriers traditionally recover their subsidy costs - then customers will flee." One hopes that Opel, and the Government, are taking note. |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
