Wimax, delivering connectivity to the full

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As operators witness a greater demand and hunger towards better broadband speeds, there are turning towards Wimax to cater to the growing connectivity needs for their set of end users

Today most of the service operators face some tough decisions and questions as they witness a rising demand for “anywhere, anytime” broadband connectivity from their set of end users. Hence operators sense that there is a real business opportunity to provide a substantial increase to the all-important average revenue per user (ARPU).

However, it is important to note here that when considering the actual implementation of these technologies, the service provider community is finding the technological landscape filled with multiple technological directions, trends, and roadmaps. This is a time when, many technologies, backed by strong vendors and consortiums are vying for the service providers’ attention to gain ground.

Interestingly, different vendors, having invested considerable amount of resources and money in the research and development of different technologies and their global standards in order to ask for better penetration.

Wimax holds special importance for a market like India, this importance stems from the fact that even though the country is surging ahead with millions of mobile connections every month, there is still a dearth of better and affordable connectivity adoption at the rural level of the country. This is where Wimax is scoring over its related competing technologies.

Mobile WiMAX Scenario

On the global scale of things, the WiMAX Forum is a worldwide organization created to promote and certify compatibility and interoperability of broadband wireless products based on the IEEE 802.16 standard. The final standard for mobile WiMAX - IEEE802.16e-2005 - was approved in late 2005. The WiMAX Forum undertakes testing and certification against the IEEE standards to ensure vendor interoperability.

Mobile WiMAX is a 4G technology and will initially operate in the 2.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz, 3.3 GHz, 3.4-3.8 GHz frequency bands. The support for additional bands will be added on the basis of market demand and new spectrum allocations in different geographies.

Mobile WiMAX Key Advantages

Mobile WiMAX, is a fourth generation mobile technology and meets all the requirements for Personal Broadband access at the end user level. This technology supports high data rates, high throughput, multiple handoff mechanisms, power-saving mechanisms for mobile devices, advanced QoS and low latency for improved support of real-time applications, advanced authorization, authentication and accounting (AAA) functionality. All these features are making this technology a very compeling option in front of the operator community and the key decision makers for technological roadmap.

Unlike the CDMA-based 3G systems, which have evolved from voice-centric systems, as a true next generation technology, WiMAX is designed to meet the requirements necessary for the delivery of broadband data services as well as voice. UMTS, CDMA2000 and TD-SCDMA are all optimized for voice applications.

This is especially helpful for a country like India. moving forward, as India continues its quest for better bandwidth providing technologies. WiMax is sure to catch the eyeballs of the operator community in terms of making that last mile access for the end customer and delivering better connectivity options.