Is the writing on the wall for Wimax? It is looking increasingly likely that Wimax could be squeezed by a rapid move to the 3G upgrade technology known as LTE for the next generation of broadband mobile technology.
Qualcomm’s decision to stop development of UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband), its own attempt to set the next mobile phone standard, and concentrate on 3G LTE (long term evolution) will dismay Wimax proponents.
Wimax is already stuttering in market deployment and Qualcomm’s announcement is just one of a number of recent developments which is turning the spotlight firmly on LTE for next generation mobile networks.
The current generation HSPA and HSPA+ 3G technologies will provide the lion share of broadband services in the short term that is for the next five years. So it will be logical for the market to then jump straight to full-blown LTE with its promise of 300Mbit/s data rates.
The result is that the window for Wimax is closing which is probably one of the factors behinds Qualcomm’s decision. The other factor is a little bit more immediate.
In an ideal world, that is a world which has not heard of the credit-crunch, Qualcomm would certainly be continuing with UMB development. But its decision to “prioritise” research efforts could have a significant impact of LTE deployments.
It is now seen as inevitable that Wimax, which has struggled to gain any serious market momentum, will be squeezed as next generation mobile technologies such as HSPA and LTE dominate the market.
A boom in the up take of wireless broadband services over the next few years could result in as many as 2.1 billion wireless broadband customers generating $784bn in service revenues by 2015.
“Despite the increasing availability of LTE and Wimax, HSPA and HSPA+ will still support 54% of wireless broadband users by the end of 2015,” said Dr Mark Heath, co-author of the report.
It is predicted that because W-CDMA to HSPA to HSPA+ is the natural evolution path for GSM operators, the number of HSPA and HSPA+ customers worldwide will increase from 61 million at the end of 2008 to 1.1 billion at the end of 2015.
The report believes that the mobile phone will be the big winner and will dominate wireless broadband services, with twenty times as many users as WiMAX by the end of 2015.
“LTE will take off relatively slowly, but its customer base will reach 440 million by 2015, with associated revenue of $194bn,” said the report.
“Wimax will fail to achieve a significant share of the rapidly developing wireless broadband market, contributing only 2% of global revenue,” concluded the report.
The LTE World Summit conference taking place in London this week has heard of a number of development which indicts the momentum building behind the air interface standard.
For example Bath-based picoChip has given details what it claimed was the industry’s first complete LTE basestation reference designs.
The significance of this is that the deployment for femtocell networks architectures could reduce the cost of LTE rollout making more attractive to operators.
“The bulk of LTE network traffic will travel via fine-grained networks of small cells. Small cells dramatically change the economics of building, owning and running cellular networks, and offer the opportunity to radically reduce the cost of launching LTE services. Paradoxically this may lead to a far cheaper launch than was the case for 3G,” said picoChip’s co-founder and CTO, Doug Pulley.
Also at tHe\ LTE World Summit, Agilent Technologies, Anite and Signalion have demonstrated 3GPP LTE end-to-end streaming video for the first time with commercially available test equipment.
The demonstration will feature LTE test equipment including the Agilent E6620A LTE wireless communications test set, Anite SAT LTE Protocol Development Toolset and Signalion LTE UE simulator.
“This LTE streaming-video demonstration shows that we have accelerated LTE far beyond the conceptual phase, and further highlights our role in supporting all phases of our customers’ development process,” said Paul Beaver, business unit director, Anite.