Clearwire's Silicon Valley WiMAX Innovation Network

Sprint-Nextel CEO Dan Hesse has said that 2010 will be "the year of 4G". The wireless operator recently contributed an additional $1.176 billion to their majority-ownership of Clearwire, to support a plan to extend mobile WiMAX coverage to a total of 120 million POPs by the end of this year. (Along with Comcast's $196 million, Time Warner's $103 million, Intel's $50 million, Eagle River's $20 million and Bright House Networks' $19 million).

Verizon Wireless is also committed to cover 25-30 cities in 2010 with their new 4G LTE technology, which they demonstrated to analysts at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Verizon also held a developers conference at CES, as part of their Open Development initiative. Clearwire had previously launched an Innovation Network in Silicon Valley, allowing developers access to the pre-commercial WiMAX network covering Palo Alto, Santa Clara (Intel), and Mountain View (Google). Indeed, the U.S. has become the world's hotspot for 4G deployment.

On March 2, Silicon Valley developers will have the opportunity to participate in a Clear 4G Innovation Network Workshop at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The only catch is that you have to be able to join the Innovation Network, which requires purchase of a Clear WiMAX modem. Currently, there is a further restriction that the shipping address for the modem must also be in one of the few authorized zip codes that are covered by the network. (So much for mobility! Pretty ironic.. eh?). Eleven base stations have been deployed to date.

At a recent meeting of the IEEE Santa Clara Valley Communications Society, Allen Flanagan – Manager, Silicon Valley Innovation Network and David Rees – Manager, Developer and Partner Enablement gave a presentation on features of the developer program and Clearwire's plans for an "Open Network for Open Devices". This is very similar to the theme of Verizon's LTE program - "Wirelessly Connect Anything", as well as AT&T's(3G) Emerging Devices program. While we've been hearing a lot of cries regarding a "spectrum crisis" lately, it's apparent that the incumbent wireless operators are putting major efforts into finding new ways to increase utilization of their data networks... because that's where the revenue growth is.

Both Verizon and Clearwire have talked about video applications as a prime target for their 4G networks. Clearwire is working with Sling Media on an application that can take advantage of the higher data rates available with WiMAX. That's an interesting contrast to AT&T, which finally relented just a few weeks ago to allow the Sling iPhone app to run on their 3G network. Clearwire has stated a goal of delivering "truly differentiated video quality", which I expect to be realized in part from their alliance with Cisco that was announced in May of last year.

From the IEEE ComSoc presentation, it's apparent that Clearwire is putting a lot of emphasis on location-based applications. With Google as an early investor in Clearwire, it's perhaps not surprising to note that the Client/Server implementation matches the Google Geolocation API Network Protocol, supporting browser access through Google Gears. A server/server API will also be provided, enabling applications such as tracking.

Since we know that performance can definitely vary as one moves about in a mobile broadband network, Clearwire is wisely supporting adaptive applications and connection management through Common API 1.2.1 (CAPI), stating that

Our goal is to expose knowledge about the network to applications and services so they can better optimize their usage of the network and improve the end-customer experience

The CAPI has been developed by the WiMAX industry to standardize access to session information, and is incorporated in Intel's WiMAX embedded laptops. Version 2.0 is under development, adding features such as sector hand-off notification.

In an interview at CES, Clearwire told me that they have no intention of departing from their unlimited data plans (in contrast to 5GB limits in competitors plans). To facilitate network management, they have implemented quality-of-service (QoS) features in their current network, according to the IEEE 802.16 specification. Clearwire is currently exercising QoS for fixed and mobile VoIP, and are planning to add dynamically triggered QoS. With 'net neutrality currently a hot topic in fixed and mobile broadband, Clearwire is in discussions with the FCC and other industry partners to determine the proper model for when QoS should be enabled.

-Mike

Wireless technology in the spotlight on Day 1 at ISSCC

(February 8, 2010)
The First day of the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) traditionally devotes Monday morning to a set of plenary sessions that provide a higher level view of industry trends, before the deep dive into detailed design papers take over in the afternoon.

In the 2nd plenary talk - "Harnessing Technology to Advance the Next-Generation Mobile User-Experience", Greg Delagi, Senior VP at Texas Instruments, provided his vision of the state of the cell phone industry. With 4.7 billion cell phone subscribers worldwide, we have reached an "inflection point" where sales are no longer driven by lower cost, but instead by higher levels of integration. The operative strategy now is differentiation, which shifts the focus to the application processor that must support all the new features that consumers demand.

Mr. Delagi cited three challenges for handset design: higher performance, connectivity, and power. While claiming that performance has increased 300X from 2000 to 2010, he showed how additional enhancements for imaging, graphics, video, display and Human Device Interaction (HDI) will drive the need for an additional 1000X increase in performance by 2015. Looking out a bit further, "new and unknown applications" will continue to demand another 300X by 2020.

According to Delagi, "MPU performance (x86) has not kept up". He showed that multicore provided a 10X improvement from 2000 to 2010, with a similar trend for ARM cores. Power limits cause performance to saturate at a 2GHz clock rate, hence the conclusion "we have a performance gap". (Or Scotty.. we need LESS power!)

Connectivity is another factor demanding increased performance as cellular modems advance from 3G to 4G, supporting data rates that will grow from ~1MBPS today to (ideally) as high as 100MBPS in the future. Add to that connectivity for mobile TV (1-10MBPS), WLAN (WiFI, Bluetooth) (0.1 - 10GBPS), and internal data moving between DRAM and non-volatile flash memory (10s to 100s GBPS).

Video capture and display in cell phones is expected to approach "near cinema quality" in the near future, requiring .2 to 2 terabytes of data for 4K HD content. New features such as pico projectors for external displays and image sharing add 0.5 to 3 Tbytes to the data load. According to the TI presentation, heterogeneous multiprocessors will be the solution, with a built-in 100GPS interconnect fabric.

The presentation included a demonstration of what TI calls advanced HDI, a forward facing (toward the user) camera for no-touch sensing of hand/finger movements that was called one of the "biggest areas moving forward". This touchless interface was forecast to appear in handsets within the next 12 months.

Batteries, as we know, have not kept up - resulting in an "energy gap". This is the single biggest issue to be resolved. Though he pointed out that the problem started with the shift to higher resolution color displays, it was curious that new display technologies to address what is the biggest power hog in cell phones were never discussed.

Through various circuit and semiconductor process tricks, Mr. Delagi concluded that we've "got the next three years covered through silicon scaling". He left it as a challenge to the industry to find and deliver another 100X efficiency to stay ahead of the energy gap.

-Mike