Mobility

October 5, 2006
The WiMAX march begins in earnest

Sufia Tippu

NEW DELHI -- And, Wi-Max is set to rock and roll – leaving Wi-Fi way behind. Touted as an ideal solution for rural areas which do not have broadband access and a region that services providers shy away from.

While any radio technology requires a clear line of sight to operate WiMAX scores heavily on this issue and can operate in no-line-of-sight, making it an ideal solution for increasing broadband penetration in rural India.

Frost & Sullivan, in its recent report on service providers' consumer strategies in Asia Pacific including India, revealed that 3G, VoIP and WiMAX are perceived as key revenue generators for service providers. In fact, most service providers have invested heavily into deploying these technologies.

Intel, which is betting big on WiMAX, sees the opportunity here and is now involved in several WiMAX trials across rural India.

Several WiMAX roll outs are helping different levels of local governments. Video conferencing operations in 3.3-3.4 GHz frequency with 2 Mbps of broadband bandwidth allow the deputy commissioner and officials to interact with citizens at the telecenter in RG Halli and Navilehalli in the Davangere district.

Meanwhile, BSNL is setting up 10 WiMAX base stations at Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Hissar, Pinjore, Rothak, and Panipat. Each of the base stations will allow BSNL to serve 2,800-3,000 broadband customers. BSNL officials had said that they were using WiMAX for providing broadband in those areas where there is no proper copper network. Currently, with a one million broadband subscriber-base BSNL is aiming to increase this five time within the shortest time span available. It intends using the available technologies and one of them of course is WiMAX.

"Growth in the Asia Pacific consumer telecommunications market will revolve around wireless, IPTV, and other multimedia services," explains Frost & Sullivan research analyst Aravind Venkatesh. "Moving forward, service providers will continue to leverage on key next-generation technologies such as WiMAX, IPTV and VoIP to offer innovative service packages to customers."

Players in the fray

WiMAX has the potential to provide India with widespread Internet access that can usher in economic growth, better education and health care, and improved entertainment services

The presence of leading WiMAX vendors in India and their partnering arrangements with local players is leading to higher penetration levels.The most significant benefit of WiMAX compared to existing wireless technologies is the range. WiMAX has a communication range of up to 30 miles and sometimes enough to cover an an entire city. Moreover the cost of servicing an end-user is much lower with WiMAX when you compare it to fibre or DSL.

Service providers right across the spectrum - BSNL, MTNL, Bharti Televentures, Reliance, Sify, VSNL and small private players such as Navini Networks and Samtech Infonet have all acquired licences in the 3.3-3.4 GHz spectrum and all of them are at different stages of trials. Wi-Fi players like Microsense and Convergent Technologies are also coming under the WiMAX radar.

One reason for this accelerated momentum in the WiMAX space is the poor penetration of broadband. As against the rapid growth of the mobile subscriber base, India is still struggling to get broadband connectivity going at full speed. And, the figures speak for themselves - a bare 1.5 million subscribers as against TRAI’s target of three million as of January 2006. The only way to achieve the figure of 20 million broadband subscribers by 2010 ( as projected by TRAI in its Broadband Policy 2004 and which could be considered quite far fetched at this point of time) is through wireless broadband connections because of the poor wired infrastructure in the country.

Another major reason for the slow pace of broadband penetration could be this: Service providers have always focused more on wired broadband access by making use of existing copper loops as well as the cable TV network –and in the urban areas at that. Wired broadband technologies such as the DSL, which can cover an area of only 3-4 kilometres from the telephone exchange/accesspoint is mostly used in the cities and towns; service providers do not even make an attempt to reach out to the rural areas because they are not able to achieve decent ARPU.

Innovative value-added services and lower price points are key differentiators in the fixed-line telephony segment. Fixed-line service providers should add value to their core services by offering bundled applications at competitive prices according the Frost & Sullivan report. Service providers in high growth markets such as India, China, Thailand and the Philippines can also explore new revenue streams by exploiting the largely untapped rural segment.

"Regulatory barriers and spectrum allocation issues have been major hindrances to the rapid deployment of innovative services in some developing markets in Asia," explains Frost & Sullivan’s Venkatesh. "Delays in introducing regulatory frameworks have hampered the launch of innovative services based on new access technologies."

India also has some of the fastest growing urban and suburban areas in the world and expanding the wired last mile solution is a big challenge for the service providers.

“The country has 650 districts and 6,500 blocks with close to 6,00,000 villages. The copper/fibre network is available till the block-level, which leaves a gap for connecting the villages within the blocks. Laying copper for the last mile in all the villages is a major challenge. Additionally the installation and maintenance costs of copper lines are also high. This is where WiMAX can make a huge difference in rural connectivity since it is easier to deploy and will be cost-effective when volumes go up,” says Deepak Bhardwaj, Director, Technology Policy & Standards, Corporate Technology Group, Intel Technology India,

Another reason why broadband has not really spread its wings could be this : cable broadband services are not able to provide faster connection and do very little to improve user experience. Radio technology such as GSM and CDMA cannot be used for broadband access because the maximum speed that you can get is 144 kbps in Edge technology.

Again, WiMAX too comes with its trail of woes. Like in any technology adoption, there are a number of hurdles, the major one being spectrum allocation. Spectrum policy from the regulators in 3.3GHz, 2.5GHz or 700MHz is unclear, as is licence policy. Added to this is are competing lobbies like CDMA. Once this becomes clear, industry watchers say that the pace of adoption would be much faster than the current 25-30 percent growth.

WiMAX on the move

And no technology can be completely divorced from the mobility space – with the mobile subscription base adding on a 4-5 million each month and mobile applications coming up rapidly both from local as well as global players.

The 802.16e standard targets the mobile market by adding portability and the ability for mobile clients with 802.16e adapters to connect directly to the WiMAX network. Intel is working on this and would be launching a new CPE chip called Ofer-R, a single-chip that would support WiMAX/Wi-Fi radio which will get into the Centrino platform for notebook PCs and would help in 802.16e or portable WiMAX deployments.

The 2.3 GHz is likely to be a major WiMAX 16e frequency for personal broadband connection. This market is slated to expand rapidly and many ISPs are keen on tackling the mobile retail segment in the next 2-3 years. This frequency will contribute largely to the success of WiMAX-2005/16e and personal broadband for indoor coverage in India. Although the 802-16e certification is not yet standardized, plug-and-play products are already available off the shelf.

Wi-fi and Wi-Max blend

A couple of years back wi-fi was the talk of the every service provider and hot-spots – right from smaller players like Mircrosense to large ones like Sify swearing by it.

But, now with the Wi-MAX juggernaut taking over, wi-fi seems to have taken a back seat but in reality it is not so. It is evolving and seamlessly integrating with WiMAX.

Wi-Fi, which offers unwired connectivity within a small radius such as within a campus, and WiMAX which covers a larger radius (upto 48 km) are becoming complementary. Since WiMAX would be a fairly new technology it will be comparatively expensive, therefore it is safe to assume that both the technologies have a role to play in the Indian market.

Says Kailash Nathan, MD, Microsense, a Chennai-based leading wi-fi infrastructure and hotspot service provider, “These two technologies (Wi-Fi and WiMAX) are merging together and mesh networks are becoming more popular with network operators discovering the benefits of using WiMAX to backhaul Wi-Fi mesh clusters (or in some cases hotspots). This leads to a reduction in network latency and is also very cost-effective to the end user.”

As Wi-Fi networks grow large enough to accommodate a neighbourhood or a city, the usability decreases due to the latency introduced with each new node. These networks also begin to get quite expensive due to the large number of nodes required. Introducing Wi-MAX into Wi-Fi mesh networks helps network planners smartly build large hot zones, backhauling traffic from heavily used hotspots versus covering large unused areas with Wi-Fi, he added.

WiMAX is here to stay

Today, with data connectivity becoming a basic requirement, both the urban and semi-urban population are demanding faster and more reliable broadband connectivity. WiMAX is set to provide the opportunity to connect enterprises, individuals, residences and SMEs to drive the next IT revolution in India—a connected India.

WiMAX enables a download speed of up to 75Mbps from base station to backhaul. At the customer premise equipment (CPE) one can get a speed of 10Mbps.A single base station can simultaneously support more than 60-80 businesses with T1/E1-type connectivity, or hundred of homes with DSL-type connectivity. Each base station can serve 2,800-3,000 broadband customers at simultaneous 256Kbps speeds.

Analysts say that India will see the WiMAX deployment for fixed wireless broadband based on the 802.16d standard in the 3.3-3.4GHz spectrum. Though the products that are available support 3.5-3.7GHz, Intel is helping vendors tweak their products to fit the 3.3-3.4GHz spectrum.) 802.16d is referred to as fixed wireless because it uses a mounted antenna at the subscriber’s site.

According to BSNL officials their broadband infrastructure can currently take one million subscribers. But with over seven lakh customers already using it, BSNL is soon likely to run out of capacity because of which, in the current fiscal, the organisation is putting in place the infrastructure for 2.8 million broadband capacity.

Against the background of the telecommunication infrastructure in rural India and the last mile access problems in urban areas, WiMAX is fast emerging as a wide-area wireless broadband access (WBA) technology that is the most promising of all the existing ones and is likely to provide high-speed broadband Internet access to homes and enterprises. It can be used to set-up E1 connection instantly to enterprises in inaccessible locations as well as transform the entire broadband scenario for the masses.

Today, India is all set to tighten its grip on wireless technologies. WiMAX for sure promises an economically viable solution for increasing the Internet penetrations and through it, touch the other sectors - education system, healthcare, e-governance and citizen and entertainment services.

It would turn out to be a supplementary technology that will co-exist with the existing DSL, just as Wi-Fi is being used an overlay to the existing wired network. And, WiMAX 802.16d is likely to speed up broadband deployment especially in inaccessible regions.

“The key challenge for all service providers in the consumer space is to maximize revenue and increase ARPU in the midst of increasing competition and most important is to deploy innovative technologies to penetrate the untapped markets,” Venkatesh added.

The first step has been taken. Now the momentum has picked up and soon we would see the completion of most of the pilot projects. One that has been completed is the Intel –VSNL one which is bringing Intel-based PC solutions and Wi-MAX broadband connectivity to Tata’s RailTel cyber cafes.

Box

WiMAX, shorthand for Worldwide Inter-operability for Microwave Access, is an IEEE 802.16 technology that supports both fixed-nomadic WiMAX WBA (802.11d) as well as portal WiMAX WBA (802.16e). WiMAX currently operates in the frequency band 3.3-3.4GHz.

WiMAX is an alternative to cable and DSL. It is the standard-based broadband wireless access technology for enabling the last mile delivery of information. Wi-MAX will provide fixed, nomadic, portable and (eventually) mobile wireless broadband connectivity without the need for a direct line-of-sight connectivity between a base station and a subscriber.

In a typical cell radius deployment of three to 10 kilometres, WiMAX-certified systems can be expected to support capacity of up to 40 Mbps per channel for fixed and portable access applications.

The key technologies that define WiMAX are IP, OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access), QoS (Quality of Service) and MIMO. WiMAX is based on the IEEE 802.16 standard and is expected to enable true broadband speeds over wireless networks at a lower price points that enables mass-market adoption.

Mobile WiMAX is based on OFDMA, which has inherent advantages in throughput, latency, spectral efficiency and advanced antennae support, ultimately enabling it to provide higher performance than today’s wide area wireless technologies.

There are two main applications of WiMAX - fixed WiMAX applications, which are point-to-multipoint enabling broadband access to homes and businesses, and mobile WiMAX which offers the full mobility of cellular networks at true speeds. Both the fixed and mobile applications of WiMAX help deliver high-throughput broadband wireless services at a low cost.”

Approximately 60 percent of the WiMAX subscribers will be mobile customers who are predominantly residential, while fixed WiMAX will continue to be driven by large corporations, and to a lesser extent, by SMB customers.