WiMax has taken a pounding of late in the media and from analysts, with questions over the Sprint rollout coupled with its failure to sign an infrastructure agreement with Clearwater, and then last week’s 3GSM event in Macau seemingly a licence to attack the technology further, particularly with claims that HSPA could be built into notebooks, one of WiMax’s key selling points. Yet none of the arguments against WiMax are enough to sway the belief of Dr Ray Owen, Motorola’s head of technology, Motorola Home & Networks Mobility, South and East Asia. 

On the contrary, Owen was bullish on the technology’s prospects in an interview last week with Broadband Communities ahead of a presentation on the role of wireless broadband at a forum during the Bangkok International ICT Expo. He said WiMax success should not be coupled to the situation in the US, but rather pointed to its potential in Asia as a true broadband technology where fibre and copper are too expensive to rollout. And he also questioned the negativity surrounding the Sprint rollout. 

According to Owen, the Sprint WiMax rollout is proceeding as planned. “There has been no let up and they’re getting ready for commercial launch next year,” he said, pointing to one of the target markets, Chicago, as a good example. He added that “people on the ground” are not as negative as some of the sentiments coming from analysts and Wall St. Motorola is one of the main vendors for Sprint. 

However, Owen also scotched talk that WiMax’s success was reliant on Sprint alone, pointing to Asia Pacific as another pioneering market. “WiMax is partly US but there’s a lot in Asia. However, the business case is different in Asia because of the lack of twisted-pair,” he suggested.  

“A lot will be driven by emerging markets. Almost everywhere, copper has come to a halt. It’s even getting cheaper to put in fiber in some places,” he said, suggesting that in many cases the only real choice is broadband wireless – whether that’s WiMax, HSPA or another wireless technology. 

For his presentation to the ICT expo, he used the case study of Pakistani operator Wateen Telecom, which was able to rollout a nationwide WiMax network in just nine months. He suggested that India was also a promising arena. “India is an interesting market and holds huge potential for WiMax – already people are playing with it there today.” 

Yet another proving ground for WiMax is Taiwan, where Motorola was recently awarded network contracts with WiMax licence holder Far EasTone Telecom. “To get the sense of WiMax you have to visit Taiwan and see how the IT world is getting behind it,” he said. 

The fact that WiMax came from the IT/Internet world rather than the telco world is one of the key differentiators from technologies such as HSPA, according to Owen. The other drawback in HSPA as a DSL replacement, he said, was that there is not enough spectrum under 3G. “We believe 3G will only get you so far if you extend the model beyond the handsets.” 

He also questioned whether HSPA would find its way into notebook PCs. “Unlike in the telecom world, in networking the chipmakers are king and Intel says WiMax is now part of the chipset. So if you make it part of the chipset, it’s not a question of which is more suitable – WiMax is already there,” he said, although admitting that WiMax networks must also be present to take advantage of it. However, he said that spectrum was gradually being released for WiMax in many markets, with the advantage that it was on average 30-40 MHz lots rather than the 5-10 MHz in a typical 3G allocation. 

“WiMax is an IP technology, so you can do things that are more interesting,” Owen claimed, pointing to the fact that it utilises the same virtual LAN technology that most existing corporate networks use today. The fact that few WiMax handsets would be available (Motorola has announced handsets for next year) also did not upset the business case, he suggested.  

“For many markets, it’s just a DSL replacement and I don’t think it’s critical in the short term to be thinking of handsets. We’re not waiting for the killer app as we have that today – broadband – and in the future moving that to the embedded market.” 

And Owen dismissed media reports of a clash between the various wireless technologies, suggesting that there is space for both in the market, particularly as soon operators in many countries will have to think about how to increase revenue when their existing voice markets are saturated.

For a free email subscription to Broadband Communities, sign up here

add to delicious | add to digg | search technorati