Stuart Corner
Friday, 22 June 2007 14:32
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
The man in charge of that project, Sprint president of 4G, Barry West,
delivered a keynote address to the FierceMarkets WiMAX Strategies
conference, held in the US as part of NXTcomm. And it was reported that
"he laid out specifics on Sprint's business model for WiMAX, but by
not-too-subtle inference he was telling the entire telecom industry the
model they must adopt for WiMAX to be successful."
That of course means the US telecom industry,
which is very different to Australia. Nonetheless his comments should
be noted if Australia really is going to get a large scale WiMAX
network.
One thing he did say showed why comparisons between HSDPA and WiMAX can
be so misleading. "His fundamental premise was that WiMAX isn't
inherently a technology with a superior cost-per-bit advantage, but
rather one with a superior cost-per-dollar-of-capital spent," NXTcomm
daily reported.
"WiMAX's wide swathes of spectrum allow carriers to deploy ten times
the capacity over the same infrastructure, he said. If launching over
1.25MHz channels, 5MHz channels, you must still use the same base
station, tower and support facilities. By launching over a 20MHz
channel, WiMAX efficiency comes in the sheer volume of capacity that
can be achieved over the same physical infrastructure, West said."
We do not yet know for sure either the frequency or the bandwidth that Opel intends to use.
West also identified mobility, which 802.16d does not support, as key
for WiMAX "This is not another voice network. This network is about
mobilising the Internet. That's probably the most important statement
that I will make today," he was reported as saying.
He also contended that the business model should be very different from
that adopted for mobile services today. "The types of consumer devices
Mobile WiMAX will support - laptops, portable media players, digital
cameras - will be attractive enough to consumers without carriers
kicking in to pay for them," he was reported saying. "Once consumers
buy their electronics they'll seek out the network in order to utilise
the full-functionality of their new purchases, but if carriers start
locking them to high-priced contracts or limiting what services they
use or how they access the network -which is how cellular carriers
traditionally recover their subsidy costs - then customers will flee."
One hopes that Opel, and the Government, are taking note.
