WiMIN or WiMAX: Stacks of WiMAX facts?

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by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Thursday, 27 March 2008

Page 1 of 4 ! Buzz Broadband certainly set the WiMAX cat amongst the pigeons when their CEO basically said that WiMAX sucks. Now the WiMAX empire and its supporters have struck back, bigtime, no doubt sending Buzz into a spin. Related stories Worms in space: NASA confirms International Space Station infected Neverfail picks Pacific pair Symantec swallows promising Australian security middleweight Attackers pushing ActiveX control just to exploit it Endpoint Virtualisation: Symantec strikes back The news that Australian ISP and telco, Buzz Broadband, had so many difficulties with their WiMAX network that they roundly trashed it during a WiMAX event in Bangkok earlier this week has reverberated around the world, with many wondering what it meant for WiMAX as it competes with 3.5G HSPA technology around the world. Interestingly, WiMAX was also highly praised by another Australian ISP and telco, Internode, with its CEO, Simon Hackett, expressing great satisfaction with the technology. Hackett took the time to respond to a disparaging commenter in our previous WiMAX story, elements of which I’m republishing in this story in case you missed it, on page 2 and 3, as he gave some extra detailed information on the success of Internode’s WiMAX deployment. Airspan, the providers of WiMAX equipment to many of the WiMAX trails underway worldwide, struck back in a press release that a commenter reprinted in the comments section of our previous WiMAX story. Interestingly, Airspan aren’t the only WiMAX provider rushing to defend WiMAX – Rob Inshaw from Nortel had some comments to make about WiMAX, Buzz Broadband and their WiMAX/VoIP issues which are on page 2. But first, Airspan’s defense. In a press release, Declan Byrne, Airspan’s Chief Marketing Officer, noted that Buzz Broadband used the same WiMAX equipment “installed in many of the 100 or so other Airspan WiMAX deployments”, but noted that Buzz Broadband “opted to go with the less-expensive micro-cell base stations in order to reduce cost”, resulting in a “well understood tradeoff of cost vs. range”, while also offeringing “HiperMAX base station” technology “which offers the best link budget in the industry for an 802.16d-2004 solution.” Byrne noted that Buzz Broadband had “significant under-provisioning issues in the core network which connected the Airspan equipment to the Internet”, and that “very early in the relationship, Airspan technical services determined that Buzz’ backhaul network was considerably under-dimensioned (again to save cost) and lacked sufficient QoS, and that these factors were the direct cause of VoIP quality issues in the network. Airspan even went so far as to offer to fund a third-party analysis to help Buzz understand these issues. Both Airspan’s help and third party assistance were refused by Mr. Freeman.” Byrne defended Airspan, noting that: “we pride ourselves on our customer service and excellent products. In the case of Mr. Freeman’s company Buzz Broadband, we exhausted all avenues to help this customer re-engineer their core network and resolve these service issues. In the end, with Mr. Freeman rejecting help from the outside, the technical and financial resources of Buzz Broadband were not sufficient to deploy a functioning network to the satisfaction of its customers. We regret the distress caused by Buzz’ poor network architecture decisions to the customers in need of Broadband Internet access and VoIP services.” So, what does Rob Inshaw from Nortel have to say about WiMAX technology and Buzz Broadband’s issues, especially with VoIP? Please read onto page 2. << First page <   1 2 3 4 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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