Wimax will compete with wired broadband

Wimax wireless broadband will be able to compete with fixed cable and DSL links as well as 3G mobile even in cities, according to a company preparing to roll out services in the UK.

The 802.16d flavour of the technology, designed for fixed links, has been widely seen as suitable mostly for rural areas where landline links are either slow or non-existent.

But Graham Currier, business development manager for Pipex Wireless , says no other technology can offer fast data links in both directions so easily and so cheaply. Upload speeds in standard cable and ADSL services are generally a fraction of those in the other direction.

Many companies need fast links in both directions, and demand from home and small-office users could increase as video-telephony and remote-access security cameras become more popular. Peer-to-peer file sharing also produces high two-way traffic.

Symmetric DSL (SDSL) requires two lines and is expensive, and cable is hampered by an infrastructure that was not designed originally for interactivity, Currier says.

He sees another market among people like students, who live in temporary accommodation and rely on a mobile phone instead of a landline. "You don't want to pay to have a line installed if you are going to move on in a while. Wimax will allow you to get broadband without tying yourself down."

Pipex Wireless, which is backed by Intel, has a head start in deploying Wimax because it already owns spectrum enough for 16 channels in the 3.6GHz to 4.2GHz range. Currently this is licensed only for fixed links, but it is likely to apply for approval for using the mobile 802.16e flavour of Wi-fi (see New Wimax chip set for launch).

Surprisingly, Currier does not like this being called mobile. "I dislike the term because it is misleading. As far as I am concerned it allows us to offer more and better services," he said.

Yet 16e will give untethered devices broadband links at up to 10Mbits/sec across cities and will both compete with and complement 3G data links, including High-Speed Download Packet Access (HSDPA) which offers access at up to 1.8Mbits/sec.

Paul Senior, vice-president of product management at Airspan , which is providing the equipment for the Pipex Wireless services, says 3G was designed for voice calls and has had data services bolted on.

"It is very good at providing roaming coverage. The handover [from one coverage area to another] is faster than with Wimax and you can call from a car travelling at 150mph."

Wimax has been optimised for speed at the expense of features like this. But it means you could sit in a café or parked car in a Wimax area and get DSL-class access.

Senior claims that handset users will never get more than 1.8Mbits/sec on HSDPA, even when these services are upgraded to a rated 14Mbits/sec. "That will provide more shared bandwidth and allow the operator to provide services to more people. But the handsets are not capable of receiving more than 1.8Mbits/sec."

Wimax bandwidth is also shared but so, somewhere down the line, is that of all broadband services. The difference is that one Wimax user can get all the available bandwidth if no-one else is using it – provided, of course, that the operator allows this.

Senior says Wimax links can be price-competitive with 3G on data because it is very much cheaper to implement.

Pipex Wireless is deploying a trial Wimax network in Milton Keynes and yesterday gave a demonstration at a test site in Stratford-upon-Avon with speeds of up to 10Mbits/sec in both directions. See Testing Wimax in Shakespeare country.

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