China is not closed to WiMAX, says Clearwire's West

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China is not closed to WiMAX, says Clearwire's West

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 3 June, 2009

READ MORE: Clearwire | WiMAX

The challenge for any new wireless technology is gaining sufficient coverage to support travelling users, and so roaming is essential. At the WiMAX Forum congress this week in Amsterdam, the technology took a step forward in this respect, with 14 companies linking for interoperability and roaming trials. Predictably, one of these was Clearwire, whose president, international Barry West - possibly WiMAX' greatest evangelist - was discussing his new role in helping the technology to expand worldwide, saying he believed even China was not a closed door.

When Clearwire gained a new CEO, former Vodafone executive Bill Morrow, recently, West moved to focus on what he probably does best - spreading the WiMAX word, sharing his long expertise in buying and deploying networks at Nextel with less experienced operators, and helping to turn a collection of WiMAX operators into a community that can leverage its collective interests.

The most obvious mutual interest is to buy equipment cost efficiently, something that is hard for start-up or smaller providers, and where West believes Clearwire - with the negotiating power that comes from having $3bn in backers from experienced carriers and other majors - can help in that respect. The promise of the sort of combined buying power that cellcos take for granted will certainly make WiMAX more attractive to many operators that could form the basis of a much extended roaming partnership, and pool of expertise, with Clearwire sitting influentially at the center.

India is an obvious target, and West does not think China's doors are closed forever to Mobile WiMAX either, despite the country's dedication to TDD-LTE for the 4G stage. "They are pragmatists. When they see what is coming out of Taiwan and that it is available now, they will want a piece of that," he told Rethink Wireless.

The Taiwanese ODM ecosystem is massively important to WiMAX' competitive positioning against LTE because it is capable of delivering products in a huge variety of form factors at low cost and with short time to market, as has been seen in many other sectors including Wi-Fi. Intel's head of the EMEA region, Gordon Graylish, was talking up this key advantage too, claiming the Taiwanese ecosystem was "not in HSPA because of an IPR situation that chills innovation and increases cost ..... and the stupid IoT processes of cellular". For all that, Graylish says Intel is "not religious" about mobile technologies - though in the Intel farm, some networks are clearly more equal than others.

The IoT situation where every device is tested against every carrier network is one that WiMAX has sought to reverse, following a model more akin to Wi-Fi with all the testing and certification carried out centrally by the Forum. This has been imperfectly achieved so far, but progress is being made, partly as a result of the active involvement of Taiwan. And the Forum announced that it would change the fee structure for its certification program, to a market pricing model, at its six labs. This was because of improved testing efficiencies, leading to lower costs, said Forum chairman Ron Resnick. "The maturity of devices that we are seeing in the labs takes less time to test compared to a few years ago," he said, while vendor options for debugging and pre-testing reduces time to market and time in the lab. "The open market model allows for WiMAX Forum certification labs to negotiate directly with vendors," added Sean Cai, deputy general manager of ZTE's WiMAX business.

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