The investment in 3G is skewing the telecoms industry’s decisions about 4G markets, it was said at the recent IEF2007 meeting in Athens.
“There is so much money involved, people are concerned to see that the investment in 3G is used to the maximum,” Rene Penning de Vries, CTO of NXP, told Electronics Weekly,
Asked which wireless technology the industry would use for 4G if they were starting from a Greenfield situation, de Vries replied: “It’s all about spectrum efficiency. In the end that would be the most important criterion. I tend to believe that WiMAX would be the one.”
“4G will be based on WiMAX if it has the performance which outperforms the other standards. If WiMAX doesn’t have the performance of extended CDMA then WiMAX won’t be successful.”
de Vries added: “This is strongly disputed by the 3GPP consortium which believes that LTE will provide the performance needed.”
Also, of course, deployment of WiMAX will be enormously cheaper than upgrading the cellular basestation to handle the new enhanced technologies such as HSDPA, HSUPA and LTE. “The estimates to upgrade a basestation are hugely different,” said de Vries.
Will China go for WiMAX? “It depends on who owns the IP,” replied de Vries. “No one wants a company which owns 60 per cent of the IP of any system.”
Software Defined Radio (SDR), which could provide a solution to multiple standards systems is “five, six or seven years away”, according to de Vries, though he emphasises that this is for systems with six or more radios.
For simpler SDR systems it will be quicker. Maybe a couple of years away. “It’s not going to be a Big Bang, it’s going to be step-by-step,” said de Vries, “the two most logical radios to put together are the cellular pipe and connectivity pipe.”