The WiMAX World Europe Conference, May 29-31, in Vienna, Austria, features a Conference Program, Keynotes, Mobile Broadband Executive Summit, and lots of Exhibitors.
News from the show floor includes:
- picoChip announced a basestation reference design, with a software upgrade to support Mobile WiMAX Wave 2 and MIMO. PicoChip says their new PC8532 WiMAX platform is the only basestation reference design to support WiMAX Wave 2 and IO-MIMO, and scales from access point (femtocell) to multi-sector macrocells.
- Agilent and Sequans announced a collaboration to support mobile WiMAX. The companies will work on pre-validating the Agilent Protocol Conformance Test (PCT) system, and on the speed-optimization of RF power-calibration and production-test systems. Sequans’ chips for WiMAX mobile stations (SQN1110 and SQN1130) feature high throughput and low power consumption. Its newest chip, the SQN1130 Wave 2-ready MIMO chip for WiMAX mobile stations, delivers more than 30Mbps throughput while drawing less than 280mW of power.
- Wavesat was selected as a finalist to receive the Industry Choice Award for its WiMAX Mini-PCI card.
According to market research firm In-Stat, better known equipment vendors like Samsung, Nokia Siemens, and Motorola got extensive press coverage in 2006, but the original market entrants - Alavarion, Aperto, Redline, and Airspan still hold the dominant market positions.
That will change as Sprint starts its network deployment, says In-Stat. The company has not selected any of those early market pioneers as an infrastructure partner. In-Stat found the following:
- At the end of 2006, there were 213.3k WiMAX subscribers, worldwide.
- Almost all of those subscribers were found in Eastern Europe, North Africa/Middle East, and the Asia/Pacific Region.
- Due to delays in 802.16e certification, In-Stat now believes the life cycle for 802.16d equipment will be longer than originally forecasted.
WiMAXCounts, a WiMAX operator tracking service, compiled the first online operator database and trends analyzer recently. This quarter’s results:
- United States, Spain and Australia were the top 3 countries in number of subscribers. In Q1 2007, they accounted for 0.5 million BWA/WiMAX subscribers.
- 52% of the deployments still used proprietary equipment, 36% applied the 802.16-2004 standard, and 12% applied wave 1 802.16-2005 standard.
- APAC accounted for 38% of deployments, Europe 33%, North America 17%, and CALA 13%.
- WiMAX service revenues in 2006 totaled US$322 million, with recorded ARPUs of US$40.76 and US$145.54 for residential and business subscribers, respectively.
- The split by subscriber type operators was 58% residential and 42% business.
- APAC operators offer higher speeds compared to other regions, yet APAC has the lowest ARPU at US$30.45 for residential.
- The price difference between WiMAX and DSL tends to be narrow, which tends to negate price as a factor for potential customers.
The WiMax Forum has hosted three mobile WiMax Plugfests since June 2006 (member press releases). The Wave 1 feature set focuses on single-input, single-output antenna systems and basic mobility.
Wave 2 certification focuses on advanced antenna array features such as multiple-input, multiple output (MIMO) arrays and using space-division multiple access (SDMA)-based beam forming. Wave 2 will most likely begin testing in late 2007 or early 2008.
A week-long plugfest sponsored by the WiMax Forum last week, at AT4 Wireless in Malaga, Spain, was the forum’s third. It focused on MIMO and smart antenna functionality for basestations and their impact on subscriber stations. Plugfests are preliminary gatherings to make sure participants are on the same page.
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