2 May 2007
WiMAX, On trial
Following years of media coverage over the forthcoming introduction into the market place of WiMAX technology, On-Communications today announces it will begin trials of WiMAX equipment for its Fixed Wireless Access business.
Ian Roberts, C.E.O. of On-Communications explained at length the company's positioning on WiMAX. 'We are really pleased to be finally getting our hands on the technology. It's been a long time coming, and its impending arrival, together with other developments in the communications market adds a truly exciting dimension to our core business.
I would also like to explain what we believe the future holds for WiMAX. This is especially important given WiMAX has been arguably the most hyped single technology since the .com boom, and the industry has failed to clearly articulate for investors, businesses and the media exactly what WiMAX will do, and for whom.
WiMAX is similar to the WiFi family of technologies (802.11(x)). The most well known is 802.11g which people are familiar with from their use of wirelessly connected laptops, home wireless networks and wireless hotspots. However, there are other not so well known 802.11 variants that are used for very different applications, such as 802.11a which On-Communications currently use for its long distance Metro Fixed Wireless Access services.
WiMAX has the same variety of uses, and like WiFi will use a master number, in this case 802.16 followed later by an alphabetic identifier for its different variants.
The commercial driving force behind WiMAX is Intel, who created a lot of 'buzz' by positioning it as a low cost alternative to the mobile networks, because it incorporated a 'handover' capability between base stations. This variety of WiMAX (802.16e) is not available anywhere yet, nor is it likely to be for some time. In our opinion there is unlikely ever to be a ubiquitous, dedicated UK wide WiMAX network to take on the incumbent cellular networks head on.
However, WiMAX is a next generation wireless technology that has some distinct advantages over existing (non cellular) wireless infrastructure. It is more spectrally efficient, which means more coverage using less equipment; it is standards based (i.e. not proprietary technology) which means operators should benefit from development collaboration and lower Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) costs, plus, it has explicit support for multi media applications including Voice.
The first variant of WiMAX to be launched is plain old 802.16, which supports the kind of FWA applications currently being sold by On-Communications. In the UK, 802.16 WiMAX product for Ofcom Light Licence Spectrum is planned for general release in late Spring / early Summer this year.
We have access to pre-release versions of the technology between now and then which we shall be putting through its paces. We shall be among, if not the first UK service provider to exploit Light Licence WiMAX, provided of course no gremlins show up in the tests.
WiMAX will provide us with new capability to drive competitive advantage. Whilst we don’t see a dedicated WiMAX network going head to head with the cellular giants in the UK, we have identified a number of opportunities to create a significant value transfer into our kind of business by combining various wireless technologies in a way not done so previously.
We are excited about how the market is shaping up and very much look forward to revealing a lot of our behind the scenes activity in the coming weeks and months.’
