Unwired reveals key suppliers & plans for national WiMAX rollout

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 01:55

IT Industry - Strategy

Spence said that, prior to choosing Huawei as the WiMAX supplier, the company had looked at 13 possible vendors. "We knocked that down to five: Nortel, Alcatel, Motorola, Cisco and Huawei. Then down to three. Nortel shot themselves in the foot, Alcatel sent out mixed signals. We are very close to Cisco and remain very close to them. Our Navini network is very robust and is providing all the cash that is paying the staff working on the Vividwireless project."

Unwired CTO, Eric Hamilton said: "Huawei far outperformed any other technology we tested at the time and we are very confident of the quality of the technology we will be receiving from Huawei."

Cisco bought Navini, supplier of Unwired's current pre WiMAX technology, in 2007 and in addition to missing out on the wireless component of the Vividwireless network seems to have been unable to leverage its relationship with Unwired to secure the router contract, which went to Juniper.

Juniper will supply its MX240 core routers, J2350 edge routers for the wireless sites, EX3200 and SRX240 firewall and security appliance. According to Juniper Networks' Alex Krawchuk, a key advantage is that all these different pieces of equipment run the same Junos operating system, reducing operating and management costs significantly (by up to 41 percent according to Frost & Sullivan estimates).

Krawchuk added: "Both core and edge routers support MPLS layer 2 or layer 3 services giving Unwired flexibility." According to Hamilton the WiMAX standard supports five levels of QoS which will be critical for supporting voice as there is no equivalent of circuit switched voice in packet networks. He said this would be an issue for LTE network operators. However, the VoLGA Forum is aiming to solve this problem.

The base stations Huawei is supplying are built using software defined radio technology - which means, according to Peter Rossi, CTO of Huawei Australia, that they can support HSPA and LTE services just as easily as WiMAX. "The single RAN [radio access network] has put us way ahead of the competition...That is really good for our customers. It means you save space and it will be green... I can distribute my base station. A hub and a satellite you can distribute functions and keep power consumption down." The Vividwireless network will have 150 wireless base stations sites and just 15 hub sites.

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