Stuart Corner
Monday, 18 June 2007 17:58
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 4
In its half year results earlier this year Unwired sought to counter unfavourable comparisons of WiMAX with HSDPA this with a chart showing the total cost of ownership of WiMAX, HSDPA and rev A EVDO networks against total throughput in gigabytes per month.
While costs for all three were comparable at 2Gbytes per month, the costs of the other two rose rapidly as volumes increased whereas the cost of WiMAX was much less affected. At 12Gbytes pre month the cost of WiMAX had risen only 25 percent, but the cost of EVDO was up 300 percent and of HSPA about 400 percent. However without more specific information such a comparison is largely meaningless. Unwired was unable to provide the source of the chart or more information.
Coonan has a strong champion for WiMAX in Motorola. I recently interviewed Ray Owen, head of technology for south & east Asia for Motorola Networks & Enterprises, who told me: "LTE has not been fully standardised but both WiMAX and LTE are IP based so we can at least say that WiMAX is heading in the right direction."
Owen claimed that the WiMAX technology which is time division duplex (TDD) and therefore uses the same frequencies for transmit and receive has a number of cost advantages over WCDMA which is FDD and uses separate frequencies for transmit and receive.
"A chipset comprises a digital part and an RF part. The cost of the digital part has gone down considerably over the last few years, but the RF part is the biggest cost and when you go to TDD technologies you have far fewer RF components so we know that the chipset for WiMax will be much cheaper than 3G [setting aside any volume advantages]."
He said that the single frequency mode of WiMAX conferred an additional operating cost advantage. "Data is inherently asymmetric, so having an up and a downlink does not help you a lot [HSPA uses 5MHz for each of the up and downlink]. With WiMAX you can allocate the whole bandwidth to the up or downlink if necessary."
