Mobile broadband on cards for UK cities

But new Wimax service from Intel and Pipex confined initially to fixed links

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World 06 Apr 2006

Mobile Wimax broadband services are on the cards for major UK cities following this week's deal between Intel and service provider Pipex, one of only two companies to own the necessary spectrum.

A rollout next year of fixed Wimax in London and Manchester will be extended to eight other UK population centres in 2008.

Mobile Wimax, using a recently drafted 802.16e spec, would have a far wider market.

Pipex has transferred ownership of its 3.6GHz spectrum to a company called Pipex Wireless, formed jointly with Intel, which put in $25m. This will will deploy the Wimax services.

Business development director Graham Currier could not say when they would go mobile because at the moment the frequencies are licensed only for fixed use.

'It is up to [the regulatory body] Ofcom to say how they liberalise spectrum but they have published policies that suggest that they would like to….[The fixed] licence is enough for the time being as the technology is not there for mobile yet.'

Currier played down suggestions that mobile Wimax could threaten 3G services. He said that if you could start from scratch with Wimax where there were no existing services you could build a better system than 3G.

'But where services are already in place it is a question of finding complementary needs and targeting them.'

So how is fixed Wimax going to compete in cities already replete with fixed broadband links? Currier said Wimax enabled the company to offer a new mix of services because it could do things, such as offering high upload speeds, that were harder to replicate on fixed lines.

'It is flexibility, the fact that you can run multiple services off a single infrastructure using Wimax standards, that is a change from previous years.'

The trend is to have broadband everywhere, Currier said. Intel's strategy was that within five years, possibly sooner, the kind of device that has currently has Wifi will also have Wimax, which would open up a lot of new business models.

Airspan, which has been involved in Wimax trials with Pipex, reckons individual mobile users could get 9Mbits/sec downstream and 2Mbits/sec up. But cities would require wide and expensive deployment of base stations to get those speeds.

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