Linksys tipped to enter WiMAX CPE market

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 27 June 2007 09:34

Opinion and Analysis

Which could be unfortunate. Nortel (named last week as Austar's WiMAX infrastructure supplier, decided early on not to develop fixed WiMAX infrastructure equipment and focus on mobile. According to Inshaw, its combination of adaptive antenna and multiple input output technologies (MIMO) produced capacity and efficiency gains that make the effort worthwhile, and he claims that trials so far have vindicated this decision.

"We did a joint study with an operator in Europe and found that we could carry high volumes of data a with five times the capacity and 20 percent of the cost of 3G. With 3G you would have to add many base station sites just to cater for that capacity."

That may well be true, but quite likely there is no need for that capacity in Opel's planned usage: for high density areas ADSL will be the go.

That's the trouble with all these comparisons and citations of decisions by overseas operators that have chosen this or that technology. Every carrier is operating to its own set of constraints and parameters, not necessarily spelt out, which either favour or dictate a particular choice: spectrum, time to market, level of demand and capacity.