Good Day, BWIA (GDBWIA) is a light compendium of news, items of interest, irreverent commentary, and occasional light analysis relating to Broadband Wireless Internet Access (including WiMAX, public access Wi-Fi, etc.).
Things That Get Me Excited About BWIA Today? A new Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) network announced for India - Mobile WiMAX, of course. At first this seemed like yet another breathless announcement of intent to deploy Mobile WiMAX, but India seems like the new Texas - everything's bigger in India. The best overall summary is a press release at Telsima; I couldn't find an equivalent press release on Tata Group's sprawling web site.
The basics seem to be that the deploying company is Tata Communications, one of the many subsidiaries of Tata Group, about which is pretty interesting reading all by itself. The only thing comparable to it that I read of are the chaeobols (sp?) in South Korea. The system vendor is Telsima, a WiMAX-focused vendor based in Silicon Valley, but apparently founded with the vision of becoming a dominant WiMAX vendor in India. Tata Communications projects to invest $500M to deploy networks in fifteen Indian cities by the end of 2008; they claim to have networks already up in ten cities. The press release makes some interesting claims about Plans to roll out WiMAX in 110 cities for Enterprise and 15 Cities for Retail Segment by 2008.
This statement is pretty soberly understated: The Indian broadband market, which today serves only 3.1 million customers in a nation with a population of over 1.2 billion, is forecast to grow significantly. Yes, I'd concur, that big a market, with that little existing Broadband Internet Access penetration would grow significantly.
Clearwire Modem Weather Report - Hollywood Hill, Woodinville, Washington - Solid 4 Bars, bright and sunny today, but the foliage is still damp from previous wet weather and a surprise frost last night. My Clearwire modem's OFDM and 2.5 GHz RF has an easy job of maintaining reliable Broadband Internet Access today. (I write about my experiences as a Clearwire user, and about Clearwire the company and as a bellwether for the overall Broadband Wireless Internet Access / WiMAX industry in the Independent Clearwire Blog.
Another glancing blow on BWIA by GigaOm I love reading GigaOm's various sites. It's usually solid information, well-presented. But when they report on Broadband Wireless Internet Access, there seems to be always one little thing that they end up missing. Today's case in point is Stacey Higginbotham's article LTE vs WiMAX: A Little 4G Sibling Rivalry. She posits that Long Term Evolution - LTE (the "convergence path" of wireless telephony standards CDMA and GSM) will eventually be on a par with Mobile WiMAX. On one word hinges the success or failure of that premise - eventually. From my observations, what Higginbotham misses is that Mobile WiMAX is being deployed now. There are hundreds of deployments out there now. Most are test or preliminary deployments, but no major issues are being reported, only minor issues of assuring interoperability between multiple vendor's devices, and that's expected in any new technology of this type. So there's not much in the way of scaling these deployments up into production, revenue service now - this year. Even with the heft, scale, and resources that the wireless telephony service providers can bring to bear, by waiting for LTE, they're handicapping themselves in a race for customers who can switch services as easily as people (that aren't locked into multi-year contracts) can switch handset devices. I think Mobile WiMAX is going to win 1) because it does what people need, now - Broadband Internet Access, 2) It's a completely open standard and we're already seeing a Wi-Fi-like ecosystem of vendors, devices, etc., so there's a multitude of choices, most of which are going to be sold on the open market, not through the carriers, and 3) Mobile WiMAX doesn't have the legacy baggage / overhead of maintaining compatibility with landline telephony standards, but it does telephony just fine with VOIP.
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Interesting-sounding BWIA-related Book I confess that I hadn't even considered the implications of using WiMAX for broadcasting, but Amitabh Kumar has, in his book Mobile Broadcasting With WiMAX.
By Steve Stroh
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(Last updated 2008-02-25)
This article is Copyright © 2008 by Steve Stroh except for specifically-marked excerpts. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).
This article was written and posted via Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA); Clearwire service using a NextNet Wireless / Motorola Expedience Residential Service Unit (RSU).
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