Or indeed: Whether Wimax? The next week or so is expected to throw up the answer as to whether the US will deploy Wimax in a significant way.
Already, major US wireless network operators AT&T and Verizon have chosen LTE, rather than Wimax. Any technology-agnostic company in the wireless industry would probably hope for just one standard to be adopted worldwide.
“It would be great for the industry, and the world, to have one standard,” says NXP’s CTO Rene Penning de Vries.
The Big White Hope for Wimax was the network operator Sprint, which was building a $5bn Wimax network in the US, and the Smaller White Hope was Clearwire, a Craig McCaw company quite heavily backed by Intel and Motorola.
Sprint and Clearwire had an agreement to build a compatible US nationwide Wimax network.
Then Sprint’s CEO, Gary Forsee, who was the company’s Wimax champion, was kicked out, and the Sprint-Clearwire agreement was scrapped.
Last October, Ed Zander, then CEO, now ex-CEO, of Motorola, told USA Today that Motorola was ‘betting the farm on Wimax’.
Maybe there’s a Curse of Wimax which terminates over-enthusiastic CEOs.
Now the speculation is that Sprint’s Wimax operation, named Xohm, will be spun off into a joint venture with Clearwire, supported by a $2bn cash injection from Intel.
People are talking about an announcement of the joint venture in ‘days’.
The irony could be if the Xohm-Clearwire-Intel-Motorola consortium builds its Wimax network operating around the 2.5GHz spectrum, and gets wiped out by a Google network operating in the 700MHz spectrum which allows a much more powerful signal.
Another moot point is: will a heavy Intel involvement help or hinder Wimax? The telecoms industry has always done its best to exclude Intel, fearing a repeat of Intel's predatory, monopolistic, litigious behaviour as demonstrated in the PC industry.
In much the same way, and for the same reasons, the telecommunications industry declined the offer of Qualcomm's 4G wireless standard UMB (Ulta-Mobile Broadband) after Qualcomm tried to screw the telecommunications industry on 3G.
And very like the Blood Bank declining the kind offer of a takeover from Dracula.
Finally a memo to Intel CEO Paul Otellini: If you announce this deal, don’t wax too enthusiastic about the technology. Remember Forsee, Zander and the Curse of Wimax.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
Comments (1)
Quote: "Already, major US wireless network operators AT&T and Verizon have chosen LTE, rather than Wimax."
Like I said some time ago, any current wireless operator who wants to protect their existing investment and network is *guaranteed* to be pro-LTE and anti-WiMAX.
Anyone who isn't currently inside the wireless networks cartel (like Google) only has WiMAX as a way to break in, so is *guaranteed* to be pro-WiMAX and anti-LTE.
So regardless of what the current network operators say, the only way WiMAX will fail to take off -- even if LTE does as well, which is very likely -- is if companies like Google fail to get into the wireless data business. I can't see that happening somehow...
There's also a difference in the business models; the network operators model is based on relatively high charges for relatively low volumes of data -- traditionally voice -- and their networks and billing are structured to deal with this, not the huge data volumes which will result from mass adoption of wireless data.
Anything set up by Google (or similar companies) is likely to be based on delivering large amounts of data for a relatively low cost per bit -- data-centric not voice-centric -- and their network will be have to be built from scratch with enough backbone capacity and billing methods to cope with this.
To compete against this the wireless operators would have to completely rebuild their backhaul networks (not cheap) and billing/charging systems, all Google & co. have to do is build theirs right in the first place -- hopefully a lot more cheaply than 3G cost the current operators.
This isn't a straight technology fight like HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, it's much more down to different philosophies and business models for LTE and WiMAX -- more like IBM (established mainframe vendor who owned the market) vs. Intel (cheeky PC upstart with a different approach)...
Ian
P.S. Except Google has *way* more money than Intel had.
Posted by Ian Dedic | February 21, 2008 4:57 PM
Posted on February 21, 2008 16:57