Fujitsu keynotes at Broadband Wireless, panelists mull 3.5-GHz spectrum

Last Thursday the Broadband Wireless World conference made its debut in conference facilities at Ceasar’s Palace in Las Vegas, NV, and the show drew a respectable gathering given its vertical nature. Both the sessions and exhibits were heavily WiMAX centric and much more bullish on the evolving technology than most industry articles of late including my own, “WiMAX wireless broadband: Fixed-flavor questions abound, mobile lurks.” Generally those gathered at the show seem absolutely sure that the fixed flavor of WiMAX will succeed in the short term followed by portable and then later fully-mobile offerings.

Keith Horn, senior VP of marketing and sales at Fujitsu Electronics, delivered the Thursday keynote.Horn described a wireless world where “consumers can take a network appliance from their home, into a vehicle, and then to their place of work experiencing transparent roaming.” Horn identified two near-term milestones that are necessary for his vision to play out. He stated, “There needs to be certified equipment deployed this year that meets the needs of the consumer. And there needs to be completion of the 802.16e standard that deals with mobility.

Horn freely acknowledged earlier failures in the wireless broadband space. He also countered with a number or reasons that WiMAX will succeed this time including regulatory support in most regions of the world that has made spectrum available for WiMAX.

Ironically, the panel following Horns’ keynote featured an interesting discussion on spectrum that took place primarily between Reza Ahy, CEO at Aperto Networks, and Mitch Vine, director of strategic marketing at Redline Communications. Both Aperto and Redline have deployed broadband wireless systems in many regions of the world – systems that are WiMAX-like in capability by obviously not certified as such testing has not begun. The duo noted that the 3.5-Ghz band will be the most prevalent spectrum for early WiMAX deployment. Indeed as I covered in “More WiMAX news: Interoperability testing and circuit-switch service updates,” Cetecom will begin certification testing this summer focused on 3.5-GHz products.

The irony comes in where 3.5-GHz products can’t be deployed – the United States. The panel pointed out that governments in Europe, The Middle East, Africa, much of Asia, South America, and even Mexico and Canada had set aside spectrum at 3.5 Ghz for broadband wireless. Recently, the FCC also ordered unlicensed spectrum be available in the US. But the FCC also has mandated that wireless systems that use the spectrum must use a contention-based media access scheme.

A contention-based scheme implies something like Wi-Fi – or Ethernet for that matter. Systems such as Wi-Fi take an ad hoc approach the air channel. A node that wants to transmit first listens for traffic, and if none is present begins transmitting. If two stations begin transmitting at about the same time, a collision occurs and both must try again later.

Contention-based systems are a good match for data-centric systems such as Wi-Fi, but are also a detrimental factor when it comes to transmitting music or video. Conversely, WiMAX was designed as a carrier-class technology that could serve in mission critical applications such as T1 replacements with guaranteed levels of service. WiMAX uses a sequential media-access scheme that guarantees each node bandwidth.

The panel agreed that WiMAX couldn’t be easily adaptable to meet the FCC requirements for deployment at 3.5 GHz. A number of WiMAX players plan to ask the FCC to reconsider the order and actually assign or sell spectrum in the 3.5-MHz band.

Meanwhile, Fujitsu also used the show as a forum to launch its WiMAX IC that will be used by Wi-LAN and Aperto among others, see “WiMAX SOC supports TDD and FDD flavors, channel agility.” Horn claims that the total market for WiMAX would hit $3 billion in three to four years, although chips will clearly be less than 30% of that total figure.