Airing for mobile Wimax

Airspan showed a prototype USB dongle at Cebit that supports mobile Wimax, in a bid to persuade operators to invest what is being billed as ‘broadband on the move’.

The company designed the 16eUSB device for a Japanese company called Yozan, which plans to set up a mobile Wimax infrastructure. It conforms to the IEEE 802.16e specification, which was approved in February.

Airspan is currently involved in a Wimax trial with UK service provider Pipex, which owns spectrum in the 3.3-3.7GHz band. But that is for fixed Wimax, which was conceived as a way of filling in gaps in land-based web access. Mobile Wimax is seen as a potential rival to 3G cellular links.

Paul Senior, vice-president of Airspan’s product management, admitted mobile Wimax would need considerable investment in base stations and dismissed suggestions, expressed by more than one vendor at Cebit, that it has little to offer that cannot be done with 3G.

Each base station would have, as a conservative estimate, 100Mbits/sec to share out, which was three times as much as ‘evolved’ forms of 3G such as HSPDA. It had all the latest technology including Mimo, which uses multiple aerials to allow multiple data streams to share the same carrier frequencies.

Individual users could expect to get rates of 9Mbits/sec downstream and 2Mbits/sec upstream, with low latency for gaming and quality of service provision for tasks such as web calls.

‘Wimax is an IP-centric wide area communication technology. 3G is voice centric… IP has been grafted onto it over seven to 10 years bit by bit and it is not looking too healthy. You get half-a-dozen users using Skype and you start to get huge issues,’ said Senior.

The Airspan dongle is quad-band, covering all the frequencies likely to be used by Wimax across the world. Intel plans to embed Wimax in future motherboards.

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