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Telecommunications Qualcomm & Intel's 802.20 stoush a long time brewing
Telecommunications Qualcomm & Intel's 802.20 stoush a long time brewing | Qualcomm & Intel's 802.20 stoush a long time brewing |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Tuesday, 20 June 2006 | |
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On 8 June IEEE-SA Standards Board chair, Steve Mills, issued a statement saying that the board had "directed that all activities of the 802.20 Working Group be temporarily suspended...until 1 October 2006. Consequently, the 802.20 plenary in July 2006 and the interim in September 2006 are cancelled." The problems are serious:. According to Mills the suspension was put in place for two reasons. "First, the working group has been the subject of several appeals from the very beginning of the group, with three appeals now pending at one level or another, and recent activity in the group appears to have become highly contentious – significantly beyond what is normally experienced in IEEE-SA. Second, a preliminary investigation into the group's operation revealed a lack of transparency, possible "dominance," and other irregularities in the working group." The reason for the suspension is widely reported to be a dispute between Qualcomm and Intel, which comes as no surprise: it was predicted when Qualcomm acquired broadband wireless technology developer and lead 802.20 player Flarion in mid 2005. 802.20 is one of the main standards paths to 4G mobile wireless, the other being WiMAX (802.16e) of which Intel is a significant and powerful backer. Qualcomm pioneered the 2G CDMA cellular technology and successfully steered it from being a proprietary fringe technology to a mainstream standard. However with the evolution to 3G Qualcomm's variant of CDMA is losing ground to the rival technology of WCDMA. so Qualcomm needs a new string to its bow. When it bought Flarion several commentators flagged a looming stoush with Intel in the 802.20 working group. According to a report on dailywireles.org at the time: "Many cellular operators, such as Sprint, appear to be jumping the 802.20 ship, climbing on board the WiMax train. Qualcomm will likely try to make Flarion the de facto standard for 802.20. Only someone like Motorola or Qualcomm might have the clout to pull it off. Competitors like Motorola, Siemens, Nokia, and Sony-Ericsson, may push back - adopting 802.16e to avoid Qualcomm royalties." A key aspect the Flarion technology is its proprietary variant of OFDM modulation, dubbed FLASH-OFDM (Flarion Low Latency And Seamless Handover). Flarion claims that its technology can offer mobile broadband data at costs an order of magnitude below 3G technologies. In February 2005 Flarion announced a key enhancement to its technology which, it claimed, "greatly simplifies network design for 1.25MHz and 5MHz OFDM multi-carrier systems and delivers a true broadband user experience while cost-effectively scaling to support Gigabyte-consuming mobile broadband subscribers throughout the entire cell-coverage area". The technology, dubbed Flexband, exploits an established component of FLASH-OFDM, known as BeaconTone, in which "subscriber devices continuously monitor in-band interference and instantaneously select the most optimal carrier to deliver maximum bandwidth and performance." Flexband enables the same frequencies to be used on adjacent cell sites by transmitting at different power levels: so that the highest power frequency in any given cell is always at a lower power in adjacent cells. As it approaches the edge of a cell a moving Flarion terminal is then able, using BeaconTone, to select a strong signal from an adjacent cell, but on a different frequency. Another major player in the 802.20 working group was iBurst developer ArrayComm, but a year ago the company was already lukewarm because of the growing conflict between working group members. ArrayComm president and founder Marty Cooper was reported saying: "We are working very hard to make iBurst part of 802.20 but it is moving very slowly and it's very political. [The standard] is still very open and we have no idea what it will be. But if [iBurst] is not adopted for 802.20 we will find another venue to make iBurst a world wide standard." The IEEE Standards Board approved the establishment of IEEE 802.20 in November 2002 with the mission to develop the specification for an efficient packet based air interface that is optimised for the transport of IP based services. The goal was to enable worldwide deployment of affordable, ubiquitous, always-on and interoperable multi-vendor mobile broadband wireless access networks that meet the needs of business and residential end user markets and able to support data rates above 1Mbps for mobile users at vehicular speeds to 250 km/hr. It is now well behind schedule. IEEE planned to have the standard in place by the end of 2004.
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