WiMIN or WiMAX: Stacks of WiMAX facts?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 27 March 2008 10:01

IT Industry - Market

A representative of Rob Inshaw, the Director of Access Technologies at Nortel (with Nortel having co-developed the MiMo technology used in mobile WiMAX antennas) contacted iTWire and gave us the following information from Inshaw:

”1) It's imperative, in the case of VoIP over WiMAX, to highlight the requirements to take a full end-to-end approach in deploying a broadband network. Not only the access technology but also a properly engineered backhaul network with end-to-end QoS implemented. It's hard to know where these high latencies that Buzz is referring to are coming from without reviewing the network, but poor VoIP performance could have nothing to do with the WiMAX network but instead with the backhaul and core softswitch network implementations.”

Inshaw continued: “2) Buzz Broadband deployed a fixed WiMAX network in the 5 GHZ band.
Mobile WiMAX (802.16e) is a later implementation of WIMAX and has been designed specifically to support real-time applications such as VoIP. QoS has been implemented end-to-end in the mobile standard. Following broadband access, VoIP is the major application that will be deployed globally on mobile WiMAX networks, and vendors are already demonstrating 30mbps peak throughput on Mobile WiMAX with latencies similar to landline ADSL implementations.”

Inshaw concluded by noting that: “3) Major WiMAX carriers in Australia will be using licensed spectrum in the 2.3Ghz and 3.5Ghz bands. 2.3Ghz in particular will provide far better coverage and performance than a 5 Ghz fixed WiMAX implementation. It is the same architecture and base technology as 3G's evolution - LTE, so it must be the right technology solution or else the 3G community would not be developing it as its implementation in LTE.”

So, what did Simon Hackett, Internode CEO, have to say about his WiMAX implementation, following some “flippant comments” by ‘Rob Moore’ on page 2 of iTWire’s previous WiMAX story about Internode’s deployment, and Simon Hackett himself?

Hackett noted in a response to a question about the number of Internode WiMAX customers that: “Now that we are in full production, we are connecting over 100 customers per month to our WiMAX deployment in Yorke Peninsula at this time, and we expect that signup rate to remain at that level until at least the end of June this year, at which point we expect to have more than 500 active WiMAX customers (minimum) on that deployment. There is another deployment being trialled in the Coorong region at this time for likely deployment there, to ultimately replace an older generation of radio equipment.”

For the rest of Simon Hackett’s answers, please read onto page 3.