The IEEE is reviewing the election and may enforce a change of line-up at a meeting this
week, but whatever the in-fighting, the little drama highlights the issues facing 802.20, and
why it, and Motorola/Cisco, should give up any idea of trying to make it dominant.
Hostility from the 3G industry
Two forces are ranged against it. One, as we have seen, is 802.16e, no longer even
pretending to coexist peacefully with its sister standard, but instead backed by companies
that want to direct the future of mobile connections unhindered. The other is the 3G cellular
industry. While WiMAX, like Wi-Fi, can be seen as a 3G alternative, it also offers
opportunities to mobile carriers, to get into the last mile market and to build up their own
hotspot networks as an integrated service with 3G, the direction that most operators are
taking. Carriers seem to think that, as long as they can adopt Wi-Fi and WiMAX earlier and
develop a better business model than the independents, these will be technologies that they
can turn to their advantage.
They are almost certainly right about this. But 802.20 is a different matter. It, too, could be
adopted by mobile operators, and some have run trials of wireless IP with partners such as
Arraycomm as a potential complement to 3G, or a way forward should their 3G investments
never pay off. However, the big operators are fearful that, as more spectrum is put on offer,
especially in the US, potentially for very low prices, new entrants or current small operators
could use low cost 802.20 networks to launch rival mobile networks that would be more
attractive to end users than 3G. In the mean time, to launch 4G services themselves, they
need to sacrifice some of their own precious spectrum.
The big players, notably NTT DoCoMo, are driving 4G – which integrates IP and cellular
communications – along the route of their own CDMA and TDMA protocols, in which they
have so much investment and expertise. The 802.20 proposal uses OFDM in a pure form as
an alternative to 3G protocols (as does WiMAX). Only Nextel has been involved in a positive
way in 802.20 from the beginning, probably because of its deeply entwined relationship with
WiMAX: The Critical Wireless Standard
BluePrint Wi-Fi (ARCchart) 24
Motorola. Navini and other vendors are convinced that the 3G players have packed out the
IEEE committee with a determination to kill Mobile-Fi before it is born.
Even if this is paranoia, and the cellular operators are merely trying to control rather than kill
the process, by the time 802.20 products are out there, they will not only have WiMAX to
contend with but broadband IP services will be common on 3G/4G networks. To have any
chance of survival, 802.20 needs to work with the 3G groups such as 3GPP, form better
relationships with the carriers, and so provide technology that works with 3G. All this will
take far more time and political nous than 802.20 has at its disposal.
Vendor support
Even if the IEEE refuses to allow the NTT election, a decision it has to make this week,
802.20 has no chance of succeeding without powerful vendor support. Not that Motorola and
Cisco are to be disregarded of course, but so far they have been far less aggressive in
backing Mobile-Fi than Intel has been about WiMAX. They seem to be disrupting WiMAX by
presenting their own alternative, without making very positive moves in favour of Mobile-Fi.
A comment from IPWireless, which is not part of any IEEE group but has been a pioneer of
mobile IP, is telling. “I’m not worried about 802.16e. If Intel’s name hadn’t been associated
with the press release, nobody would have taken any notice,” said senior director of
marketing, Jon Hambridge.
That is the whole point. Nobody would have got excited about WiMAX without Intel’s and
Nokia’s activities because it would have lacked the vendor interest that takes a standard
from obscure committees to real products and market strength. After all, the IEEE ratifies
standards, it has no responsibility for ensuring their uptake or success. That is the role of the
industry players, which score the double whammy of helping to set the standard and then
using it to encourage users to step up their spending. Motorola has the potential to do a
similar job for 802.20 but it is in a more ambiguous position. With the carriers’ new found
hostility, it will not want to alienate the main buyers of its cellphones too recklessly.
So it seems that 802.20 will fade into insignificance, or will be redirected into a niche
application, notably one area where it excels – mobile communications in fast moving
vehicles (the standard specifically supports vehicular mobility, at speeds up to 250km per
hour). Undoubtedly its real supporters, led by Flarion, will establish it in their own market and
will gain some wins with second rung operators, especially in developing countries.
Interoperability via 802.20 will benefit them here and work done under the IEEE auspices
will filter through into operators’ 4G developments and into WiMAX.
The best result will be if both camps come together, with the 802.20 rump adopting WiMAX
specifications into their products and the best of 802.20 finding its way into 802.16e.
Ironically, this has a far better chance of happening once Motorola accepts defeat and seeks
out another weapon to push forward its strategies, and the vendor stand-off collapses with
the victory of WiMAX.
WiMAX: The Critical Wireless Standard
BluePrint Wi-Fi (ARCchart) 25
5. The Last Mile: WiMAX and Broadband
Wireless Alternatives
Various technologies are being trialled for delivering broadband wirelessly to the last mile:
• to extend the edges of the 3G network and fill in coverage gaps
• to provide a lower cost alternative to cable and DSL
• to provide enterprise campus-wide or multi-site wireless networks by providing
backhaul for WLANs.
The key technological approaches are:
• WiMAX
• Wireless Local Loop based on IP and OFDM, including wireless voice over IP
• Satellite
• Smart antenna
The history of broadband wireless has been largely one of disappointment to date. Pioneers
like Teligent, Nextlink and Winstar entered the market in the late 1990s with networks based
on cost effective LMDS (Local Multipoint Distribution System), but they played safe and
stayed in over-served metro areas of the US rather than remote regions, and having paid
huge federal fees for their licenses, all three companies filed for bankruptcy.
Carriers such as MCI and Sprint invested in an alternative, MMDS (Multi-channel Multipoint
Distribution System) but failed to gain significant market momentum. Hence the excitement
around Wi-Fi hotspots, hotzones and community networks, but coverage scalability beyond
a few nodes is hard to achieve without performance failures.
Enter WiMAX, promising a lower cost backhaul for these hotspots than T1 and the option of
a mesh network topology, as well as being a wireless extension to cable, fibre and DSL for
last mile.
WiMAX will drive broadband wireless access (BWA), but it has also come to the fore at a
time of renewed interest in wireless last mile, as operators look for new sources of revenue
and consumer demand for fast internet access grows exponentially.
Like Wi-Fi, BWA looks set to achieve the difficult task of creating a boom in a depressed
communications sector, by offering better price/performance for network users and a
revenue opportunity for squeezed suppliers. Europe has been slow to get excited about this
market, but now that BWA solutions based on IP are becoming realistic, even the 3G
operators there will need to examine these as an addition to their service.
In the US, last mile and wireless broadband solutions using unlicensed spectrum have been
given a huge boost by the freeing up of vast swathes of bands by the FCC. The US carriers
have also shown interest in last mile solutions to extend their networks and plug gaps. In
Europe, progress is slower because the carriers have a more ubiquitous network and a vast