2nd Day Opening Keynote
Stanford professor Arogyaswami Paulraj, who is also CTO & Co-Founder of Beceem Communications, opened the 2nd day of the Symposium with his presentation on WiMAX – Enabling the Mobile Internet. Beceem is one of the top three providers of WiMAX chipsets. (note: For more information on 4G chip set vendors, see my report on The Emerging 4G Wireless Landscape in the U.S., Operators, Chip Sets and Consumer Electronics.)
The perspective of a small chip vendor's point-of-view provided an interesting contrast to the 1st day keynote by Intel Fellow and Mobility Group CTO Dr. Siavash M. Alamouti. Dr. Paulraj had also founded Iospan Wireless, an early pioneer in MIMO-OFDMA that was acquired by Intel in 2003, providing one of the early pieces of Intel's WiMAX push.
Grading WiMAX Development
From his early involvement in WiMAX development, Dr. Paulraj presented an assessment of how well the objectives for WiMAX circa 2002/2003 have been met.
- Get national administrations to allocate large chunks of new spectrum (> 2.0 GHZ band) for broadband wireless - GOOD For the U.S., Clearwire has a wealth of 2.5GHz spectrum. Disappointments have been in Europe, and in China's decision to go their own way with TD-CDMA. (Though there is some feeling that China is not a done deal as of yet).
- Create new operators and convert 3G incumbent operators to pursue this new opportunity - MIXED Some new operators have emerged, such as Clearwire (U.S.), UQ (Japan), Packet One (Malaysia), but most existing 3G operators have chosen to wait for LTE development.
- Build a large eco-system with strong competition – GOOD, perhaps TOO GOOD
Dr. Paulraj made the point that the WiMAX initiatives may have been "too good", in that so many companies have joined the ecosystem that there is intense pricing pressure and competition, leaving "not enough margin in the system". He cited an example from India, where a $42 WiMAX dongle is already below the price of equivalent 3G device.
- Keep Intellectual Property Rights overhead low - GOOD The IPR situation for WiMAX is generally much better than for LTE, where some operators remain cautious because key participants in LTE development, such as Qualcomm, are not participating in the pooling of patents.
- Start with fixed broadband and evolve to nomadic and eventually mobility – TOO CAUTIOUS
Dr. Paulraj stated that the mobile version of WiMAX could have been developed earlier, but was held up for resolution of handoff issues. As a result, "a couple of years" were lost in the process.
In the "assets" column for the current state of WiMAX, Dr. Paulraj listed:
- Cost/bit far below any competition due to cheap and plentiful spectrum. In India, WiMAX spectrum was acquired at one-tenth of 3G cost. He estimated that WiMAX will deliver one-fourth to one-fifth, maybe even one-eight the cost/bit of 3G.
- 3-4 yr lead of MIMO, OFDM in WiMAX over LTE.
- Need to build more momentum behind IEEE 802.16m story.
- Need stronger players for chip sets; 3 companies Sequans, Beceem, GCT are too small, and barely profitable. Need more consolidation.
The Worldwide WiMAX Footprint
To complete it's U.S. deployment Clearwire will require $2-4B. In his presentation, Dr. Paulraj shared his insight that he "understands they will get that soon". He emphasized the need to support dual-mode 3G/4G connectivity in order to achieve national coverage - a strategy that Sprint and Clearwire have now officially announced they will implement in August.
Beceem has been a provider of WiMAX chips to BSNL in India, which has deployed ~1M modems and 4,000 base stations with plans for 3.5M modems and 8,000 basestations later this year. Dr. Paulraj said that India will be a “huge opportunity” for WiMAX.
WiMAX Semiconductor Projections
Beceem's estimates of WiMAX chips sales are somewhat lower than those of the WiMAX Forum, predicting handsets to be the smallest application category, with embedded laptops the largest. The Beceem chip forecast (in 000s) is shown in the figure below. Handsets for WiMAX have yet to be introduced in the U.S., though they are avaialble in Taiwan and Russia. Sprint has announced plans to have a tri-mode (CDMA, WiFI, WiMAX) handset in 2010. Samsung, who has now introduced the WiMAX Mondi "tablet" MID for Clearwire's service, develops their own chips and could be developing a phone for Sprint/Clearwire as well.
WiMAX Non – Handheld Markets
I mentioned the "internet of things" in my earlier post. Some of the "non-handheld" markets for WiMAX that Dr. Paulraj listed are:
- Home access: CPEs, set-top boxes.
- Small-business access: routers, gateways.
- Vehicular access: car, bus and rail internet.
- Sensor networks: public safety, transportation, smart grid.
- Equipment automation: agricultural combines, military.
- M2M: vending machines, fixed and mobile billboards - digital signage.
Beceem Chipset Roadmap
For handset applications, the roadmap for the rest of 2009 calls for introduction of an integrated WiMAX chip for handset applications that integrates VOIP plus 3G/2G and WiFi. Year 2010 would see the addition of application and media processors along with GPS. For non-handset applications, integration of video processing is planned for 2010.
Summary
The presentation concluded with the vision that the future of WiMAX is to "get in bed" with 3G and work together. In the U.S. that is well underway in the Sprint-Clearwire collaboration. Perhaps having lived the lessons of how hard it is to build a successful chip company, Dr. Pauraj advised that the opportunities to look at are in applications of WiMAX, and not in chips.
In the Q&A, I asked "Does Clearwire’s spectrum advantage give them a market advantage over the LTE plays that Verizon and AT&T can make in the future?"
Dr. Paulraj responded that spectrum is a “huge” value, otherwise operators need to split cells to cover capacity needs. With a wealth of spectrum you can simply add radios. He stated that in Europe the 3G network is maxed out already. In India there is also a wealth of WiMAX spectrum at 80MHz, more than all 2G/3G operators.
He stated that Clearwire must go to the MVNO model to package 3G/4G services. The same applies in Japan, but India is not seeing it that way yet. He confirmed my analysis that Verizon and AT&T do not have enough spectrum today to match Clearwire's average of 120MHz of 2.5GHz WiMAX spectrum.
Another questioner asked: "In the battle between LTE and WiMAX, what comes next? Will they merge?"
The answer was that LTE incumbents Qualcomm and Ericcson don’t want to talk about it, because they are late and they lack sufficient spectrum. Dr. Paulraj believes that "Politics won’t make it happen, but it could happen through a common engine – products not standards".
-Mike
The IEEE Mobile WiMAX Symposium, which I attended for the first time last week, is a small (~50 people) workshop-style meeting that provides a great opportunity to interact with leaders in the field of 4G technology. Keynote presentations provided an overview of technology directions and vision, while individual paper sessions dug deep into details of theory and applications.
Opening Keynote
Intel Fellow and Mobility Group CTO Dr. Siavash M. Alamouti opened the symposium with his presentation on "Mobile WiMAX, Roadmap for the Mobile Internet Revolution". Dr. Alamouti began with an expansive vision of the impact of the internet from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). While we tend to focus on how 3G and 4G technologies will create a ubiquitous mobile internet for our laptop PCs and smartphones, the OECD takes a broader view while raising some societal concerns that I also touched on in my last post here (CiscoLive! and the impact of video).
Beyond the current Internet, a set of new technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) and location-based technologies, are predicted to enable new innovative applications and cause the network to evolve into an "Internet of Things". In the longer term, small wireless sensor devices embedded in objects, equipment and facilities are likely to be integrated with the Internet through wireless networks that will enable interconnectivity anywhere and at anytime. The future uses and capacities of technologies that bridge the physical and virtual worlds are expected both to bring economic benefits and raise new societal challenges.
-OECD Policy Brief, June 2008
The "internet of things" is a subject that I will be writing more about, and it was somewhat of a recurring theme in other presentations at the Symposium as well.
3G/4G Wireless Business Models
Dr. Alamouti then focused on issues in wireless operator business models that, in his opinion, are inhibiting the growth of the mobile internet.
"Why is the cellular industry not motivated to deliver mobile internet?"
One of his central arguments was that operators have been slow to deliver the mobile Internet because the relative cost of delivering data is much higher than for voice, while the current revenues (and ARPUs) are much lower. I see the situation as just the opposite.
Almost all growth is coming from data, which should be plenty of incentive for providers to invest more in this area. While overall adoption of 3G services is currently only around 10%, this is by far the highest growth area in the U.S. cellular business, and the revenue differential is not as large here as in other regions of the world.
Emerging markets pull down the overall average because of the necessity to provide very low cost handsets and services.
More than forty percent of cell phone users have expressed a desire to purchase a smartphone as their next handset. Data ARPU is growing rapidly, while voice ARPU has been flat or declined for most operators in the last two years.
Looking at the leading example of this high growth area; AT&T has gained tremendously from the iPhone, adding 1.6M new users in Q1-2009 alone. As a result, in Q1-2009 AT&T had data revenue of $3.2B (+38.6% Y-Y), contributing to overall wireless revenue in the quarter of $11.7B (+9.6% Y-Y). Data revenue accounted for more than 86% of the overall growth from Q1-2008 to Q1-2009.
All these points argue for accelerating deployment of lower cost/bit flat IP-based 4G networks. (I cover this topic in more detail in my report on The Emerging 4G Wireless Landscape in the U.S.). However, different business models are required as well. Dr. Alamouti correctly pointed out that
"Consumers do NOT understand the cellular data usage model"In my opinion, capped data plans that penalize so-called "abusive" data consumption should have gone out with AOL dial-up. Operators need to make their plans easy to use and affordable. For cellular voice adoption the technical issues have been coverage and reliability. For data plan adoption, the new issues are capacity and speed.
Lack of capacity has become the cellular industry's dirty little secret. As a result, one of the growth areas in the wireless industry now is the development of policy enforcement and traffic management tools to help operators avoid having their 3G networks crawl to a stop. (See Webinar: The Multi-faceted Role of Policy: PCRF and the Personalization Imperative, as an example).
Intel's "Wireless Silicon" Roadmap
The Atom™ microprocessor was described as a device that "will revolutionize the PC industry to mass market affordability and mobility" in Dr. Alamouti's keynote address. Just announced Q2 results from Intel show that the device is having an impact on the company's bottom line, with revenue of $362M (up 65%). Intel's wireless silicon roadmap segments the market in three ways:
- Notebooks Calpella platform
- MIDs Moorestown platform
The Echo Peak V, to be available later this year, will integrate WiFi with WiMAX, GPS and Bluetooth on a single SoC.
WiMAX Technical Advantages, Current Status
The presentation then moved into the technical advantages of WiMAX, current commercial deployments, and the vision for further WiMAX development.
Technical Advantages
Cost/bit is claimed to be 3 times better than HSPA (AT&T's 3G system), while Clearwire's cost/bit is 10 times better due to their wealth of 2.5GHz spectrum.
The preferred TDD communication method in WiMAX provides the same coverage as FDD, higher download capacity, better MIMO antenna performance, more flexibility, and cheaper devices.
(note: TDD allows better allocation of upload/download spectrum, and is preferred for asymmetric applications such as internet data. FDD is the preferred LTE method, but is better suited for symmetric applications such as voice, since FDD requires paired channels).
Current DeploymentsJapan's UQ Communications (which recently received $42M from Intel) has deployed more than 1200 WiMAX base stations, and is seeing typical download speeds of 15.8Mbps.
Yotta in Russia has deployed 1600 WiMAX base stations, and the service supports the 1st dual-mode GSM/WiMAX handset, the HTC MAX™ 4G.
Korea's KT WiBRO service has 200,000 users.
In Taiwan, VMAX has 30MHz of 2.5GHz spectrum ,and is beginning commercial WiMAX deployment in Q2-09.
In India, BSNL is investing $750M in their WiMAX rollout, soon to make India the largest commercial WiMAX network in the world.
Brazil's Embratel has deployed WiMAX in the 12 largest cities, with 20 cities to be covered by the end of 2009.
In a test of Clearwire's mobile WiMAX in Portland, on a 17 miles route with average vehicle speed of 35 mph (max 55 mph), the following results were achieved;
Comparison of WiMAX and LTE
The material that Dr. Alamouti presented on the comparison of WiMAX to LTE is similar to publications from the WiMAX Forum. The bottom line is that while LTE has garnered more press recently, no commercial deployments of LTE are expected until 2010 and the two technologies are actually very similar in the potential performance they offer. LTE is saddled with more intellectual property rights issues, and the primary FDD profile that is non-ideal for internet data applications. Both LTE and WiMAX require new Radio Access Networks (90 – 95% of CAPEX), and conversion to an all IP core network (<10% of CAPEX).
Roadmap for WiMAX, IEEE 802.16m
The IEEE 802.16m roadmap, which targets the future ITU-Advanced 4G specification, was covered in more details in another Intel keynote on the 2nd day of the symposium. I will cover that in a later post.
By 2012 real-time video and interactive gaming are expected to dominate mobile internet usage. The 802.16m specification implements backward compatibility to current IEEE 802.16e mobile WiMAX, while targeting peak download speeds of 300Mbps in 20MHz channels. Bandwidth of up to 100MHz will be required to meet the ITU target of 1Gbps download.
SummaryThe opening keynote was a good introduction to the current state of the 4G world, from the WiMAX/Intel perspective. Mobile WiMAX does have the early lead over LTE in delivering mobile internet capability. Dr. Alamouti put it this way:
"As necessity is the mother of invention, WiMAX is the father of LTE"
LTE gets more attention because it is supported by more of the largest operators (e.g. Verizon, AT&T, Vodaphone). However, that same support is leading to issues that greenfield operators do not face. Lack of SMS support is an issue, along with the need for voice services. Because of this Verizon and other early LTE adopters have emphasized "data only" for first deployments, while T-Mobile is emphasizing that voice is a necessity in order to achieve the lower operating costs of an IP network. Meanwhile, dual-mode and tri-mode WiMAX handsets will be available before LTE sees its 1st deployment.
It might make for more tantalizing headlines, but this is no more a "winner take all" contest than was any previous generation of wireless technology. The 3GPP supporters may hope that one global standard will be defined by the ITU, but as was stated at the symposium: "the ITU will follow what the industry does". Keep in mind that both LTE and mobile WiMAX are currently defined as 3G technologies by the ITU.
WiMAX will co-exist with LTE, and for that matter 4G will co-exist with 3G as well, for many years to come.
-Mike
I attended Cisco live! this week at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. This is the 20th year of the company's annual customer event that combines a trade show including Cisco and partner company presentations, with an extensive education program for network engineers, IT management, and service providers. Perhaps I should modify my opening statement somewhat: I attended in person on Tuesday, and in the virtual auditorium on Wednesday. With Cisco's tele-presence capabilities, that probably comes as no surprise.
There was an emphasis on the benefits of tele-presence and virtual meetings in CEO John Chambers' keynote address, to the point of suggesting that in the future "every employee of every company" will work this way. There are advantages and disadvantages to this, so it will be interesting to see how much this prediction holds true. I am happy that I attended in person on Tuesday, so that I could personally interact with presenters in the Cisco booth as well as in partner booths. You never know who you will meet or what you might find that way, and I definitely benefitted from the chance encounters and face-to-face interactions. This was especially valuable for my 1st time attending the event.
On Wednesday, having spent the entire day before at Moscone, I was glad to save the commute time & parking fees since I was mostly interested to hear CTO Padmasree Warrior's keynote. Someday I hope to have a broadband connection that is fast and reliable enough to support this type of live event. I experienced freeze-ups live and also when I listened to the replays later. Technology difficulties aside, my opinion is that the virtual meeting is great when you are passively participating in an event, or when your role and level of participation is well-defined - like in company meetings. A tradeshow is more about exploring, and the virtual version is somewhat limited. It can be a happy medium to save expenses of travel, and I also think it's brilliant to offer this alternative to keep customers engaged who cannot be physically present, especially in this economy. Other industries that are seeing declining trade show attendance should offer this as well. Nevertheless Cisco live! still had record attendance of ~10,000 .
It is was interesting to see the emphasis on the role of video in John Chambers' keynote, where he said that this was the biggest change since last year's event. The latest release of the Cisco Visual Network Index predicts that video will account for 91 percent of global consumer internet data traffic by 2013. This explains Cisco's purchase of Pure Digital Technologies, makers of Flip Video™, a device that was described as the "tipping point" for video in Chamber's keynote.
One of the tag lines at Cisco live! was "the network is the platform". When I first saw that it struck a chord in my memory, and I realized that it looked very similar to the original Sun Microsystems motto; "the network is the computer". But after thinking about it, and hearing the discussion of how the platform here is the integration of all forms of communication – it made sense. When Sun started, they were the best at networked workstations. But that was when networking was just about computing… about data. In 2009, networking is very much about the content, which is increasingly video. Cisco refers to the embedding of video within the network architecture as Medianet. Rather than treating video as raw data, the optimized network has intelligence built in to routers to automatically perform functions like scaling video for different displays, incorporating search capability, and translating audio to the language of the recipient.
Demos during the keynote incorporated devices like RFID tags and remote sensor networks. In one example, a sensor network could be used to detect outbreaks of fever symptoms among the population, simply by tracking individual's thermal images in public places. With recent flu outbreaks this is a timely topic, but it struck me that it also raises some privacy concerns, even if the data is "anonymous". Discussions of the use of surveillance cameras have been in the news a lot, but I can see how technology advances like this could take the discussions up a notch. The potential to acquire, track, store and transmit information regarding surveillance video, essentially in real time, is likely to lead to many new discussions of the right to privacy vs. public welfare.
The consumer side of the business was well represented at Cisco live! I had fun in the "digital crib", a model of a networked home, with wireless distribution of music and video. There were terabyte networked media hubs from Linksys to store all the media on, connected to 802.11n routers, along with wireless speakers and iPod docks. I'm wondering how long before we see an iPhone app. The iPod Touch and the iPhone can connect to Bluetooth-equipped devices, but it would be really cool to do it over WiFi anywhere in the house. I'm not sure how much Apple would like that though.
I have much more in my notes from Cisco live!, such as the Intel presentation by Kirk Skaugen (vice president of the Digital Enterprise Group and general manager of the Server Platforms Group). His presentation on "The Embedded Internet" was very interesting, especially regarding WiFi and WiMAX. Power savings that can be achieved at the server level brought home the #1 issue that the chip-level folks like myself have been keenly aware of. It makes all the on-chip power management struggles somehow more real when you think about it in terms of the eventual impact on greener technology.
But that will have to wait for another post.
-Mike
