A world of overlapping fourth-generation wireless technologies is still years in the offing even by the most optimistic observers, yet there’s already a growing market for companies looking to prepare for the next frontier in mobile.
Long Term Evolution, WiMAX and Ultra Mobile Broadband each carry the potential to deliver wireless data at incredibly high speeds, yet all are OFDMA-based technologies so much of their structure is similar and much of the work that goes into their development can be re-used for competing technologies.
Unbiased companies that test these technologies have not concluded any clear winner based on speeds because so much of their performance is based on channel width and real-life situations on the ground.
Tellabs Inc. is currently working with many carriers as they try to map out their eventual migration to 4G. The company provides Ethernet-based backhaul that keeps costs down while providing the bandwidth speeds that 4G promises.
While most carriers are still midstream on nationwide 3G network deployments, be it either CDMA2000 1x EV-DO or UMTS/HSPA, the fundamental problem is that carrier costs are continuing to rise while average revenue per user remains relatively flat, said Mike O’Malley, director of external marketing at Tellabs. “That’s being caused by a lot of these flat-rate data plans,” he said.
“Carriers on the wireless and wireline side are seeing that multimedia is a good way to get new revenue from their end users,” O’Malley explained.
One of the biggest drivers for faster multimedia is high-definition video, he said. “High def is very, very bandwidth hungry,” O’Malley said, adding that a single HD stream is on the order of about 25 megabits per second.
Three will enter, two will leave
“We are very focused on these new standards, even if they won’t come quite as fast,” said Arnon Friedmann, wireless infrastructure software manager for Texas Instruments Inc.
“While we know that the new stuff is coming and everyone is looking at it . the older technologies tend to last a bit longer,” he said. “Infrastructure is a slow-changing market.”
Fred Wright, senior VP and GM of the networks business at Motorola Inc., said he doesn’t believe all three technologies will survive beyond 2015. “If I look out to year 2015, I think there’s going to be two surviving broadband technologies, I don’t think there’s going to be three,” he said.
“All three are going to have similar performance,” Wright said. “I think you’re going to see similar downlink performance and similar uplink performance.”
O’Malley added: “It’s difficult to say any one is inherently better than any other one.” Yet many are still tipping their hats to LTE and WiMAX, suggesting that UMB faces the steepest climb to large-scale adoption
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WiMAX
“The reality is WiMAX is here, it’s real, it’s here, it’s now. It’s got a couple of years head start from UMB and LTE,” said Motorola’s Wright.
“We made a huge bet nearly 4 years ago on WiMAX,” he said. “It’s a very real industry that’s got plenty of global momentum behind it. That doesn’t take away from the momentum behind technologies like LTE.”
Motorola claims 13 contracts for its WiMAX business and is engaged in 40 trials (some of which are related to contracts it has already signed). Those contracts include a significant portion of Sprint Nextel Corp.’s planned WiMAX deployment, which is expected to begin trialing by the end of the year and cover 100 million potential customers by the end of 2008.
Wright does admit, however, that WiMAX needs some improvement on its uplink speeds.
Much of the industry would be migrating from HSPA to LTE, said TI’s Friedmann. “We don’t think WiMAX is going to disrupt that flow,” he said.
“The biggest challenge that we see in WiMAX is WiMAX comes from the fixed world,” Friedmann said. “We definitely believe that WiMAX is going to be a successful market, it’s just not going to be on the scale of LTE.”
LTE
Subscriber numbers for LTE should approach 24 million by 2012, according to a new report Jupiter Research released last week. The firm forecasts that by 2010, LTE should be going commercial and high definition could be a reality on devices by then.
“We expect LTE to begin to achieve significant market traction towards the 2011 to 2012 timeframe,” wrote Howard Wilcox, the report’s author. “As the GSM Association has said recently, it is a natural follow-on from HSPA and will benefit from the extensive installed base of HSPA worldwide. Western Europe will account for over half of LTE subscribers in 2012.”
LTE also received a boost last week from Verizon Wireless, which announced it has selected LTE as its next-generation technology path. The move aligns the country’s No. 2 carrier with Vodafone Group plc, one of its parent companies.
Motorola’s Wright says the reality of WiMAX is putting more pressure on LTE. The company is looking at doing its first field-controlled trial in the second half of 2008 with initial market deployments in late 2009 and full commercial deployments in late 2010.
Motorola anticipates that the technology will be launched and ready before chipsets and devices are available. “We think that semiconductors are going to lag a little bit behind infrastructure,” Wright said.
The company will, however, benefit handsomely from its work and development on WiMAX. “We are assessing that about 80% of the technology that we’ve developed for WiMAX is re-usable for LTE,” Wright said. Base stations and radios will all have similarities, he added.
“All of our modeling has been done with equal channel width and the output has been plus or minus 5%,” he said. “It’s certainly not enough to say one is a clear winner over another.”
UMB
Motorola hasn’t yet developed any UMB products, but says it will build UMB products if customers want it, Wright said. “It’s a really, really good technology, but there aren’t any new CDMA networks being built in the world.”
One possibility for UMB was Verizon Wireless, but the carrier’s decision to go the LTE path has left the CDMA camp in a lurch. A consolation could be Sprint Nextel, which could still use UMB as an upgrade to its traditional cellular network, or even as a fall back if its WiMAX plans fall through.
Likewise, TI isn’t really “pressing the UMB market much,” Friedmann said. “We see a lot more interest in LTE and WiMAX.”
Furthermore, if UMB takes off “Qualcomm (which is backing the UMB technology) will own that market anyway,” he added.
“We definitely think the roadmap to LTE for cellular is pretty clear,” Friedmann said. “Certainly UMB is kind of out on its own right now.”
