WiMAX operators re-think their business plans | Bangkok Post: tech

3G EVOLUTION

3G will continue to evolve with speeds reaching 42 Mbps this year and 84 Mbps soon, lessening the need for LTE and making WiMAX operators and regulators re-think their business and frequency allocation plans, while on the device side we will soon enter an era where everything is connected and see an explosion of new form factors filling all sorts of niches that will make our lives better and richer.

John Stefanac, President for Southeast Asia and Pacific, Qualcomm, said that the mobile industry has seen both convergence as phones take over the functions of MP3 players and cameras, but at the same time, we see divergence with dedicated types of new devices and new classes.

"It is only now with the power of the [Qualcomm] Snapdragon where it has really started to blur the distinction between the smart phone and the computer," he said.

The future will be feature multiple OS, Symbian, Android, Chrome and even the Linux-based phones such as Maemo (now merged with Intel's Moblin and renamed Meego) and Qualcomm is ready to support all of them.

Asked how much of a threat Intel was to Qualcomm, which licenses and makes ARM processors, given its vision of X86 everywhere, in particular, with the announcement of the first Atom-based Meego phone, LG's GW990, Stefanac said that the distinction between Qualcomm and Intel is that Qualcomm comes from the phone and it is easier to provide a product that is capable of running smart phones and growing up rather than scaling downwards a PC architecture for a phone's power envelope and form factor.

The rise of e-readers reminds Stefanac of back in 1979 when he had to go around with two bags full of books. Today his daughter studies with most of her books not on paper, but on CDs. Tomorrow, we might have e-readers, smartbooks or netbooks, but whatever form factor prevails, what is certain is that they will be connected to the Internet to ensure that all the information is current.

Aside from education, another key area for new devices that Qualcomm is interested in will be healthcare.

Stefanac recalls an event that made him so excited back in 1975. Someone demonstrated a TV add-on that allowed an image of a document to be scanned on one end and then transmitted to the screen on the other end of the line.

Stefanac says that there is no division between the CPU and radio from Qualcomm's point of view. Why should there be a distinction? Not that long ago, a laptop would have Wi-Fi as an option on an add-on card. Today, it would be much harder to find a laptop without Wi-Fi built in.

Qualcomm's vision is for always on connectivity; for the smart phone, netbook or smartbook or other device to be able to receive email notifications even when closed.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon CPU, which made headlines for being the first mobile ARM architecture CPU to hit one gigahertz, will continue to evolve with 1.3 GHz speed and dual-core versions sometime in the second half of this year.

So what is the future of LTE and when will it displace 3G? Qualcomm does not believe LTE to gain critical mass at least until 2013 and meanwhile the industry will continue to see strong development in 3G. A year ago, people were still rolling out 7.2 or 14.4 Mbps Today the norm is 21 Mbps and 42 later this year. In 12 to 18 months, Qualcomm will be shipping 84 Mbps 3G chips.

"The need for 4G has perhaps diminished somewhat in light of the increased capacities of 3G," he said.

Qualcomm's first 42 Mbps solution, available in the latter half of this year, will be based on Dual-Channel HSPA as part of 3GPP release 8. This means using two five-MHz channels on the same block (2.1 GHz), each running 64QAM modulation (21 Mbps each). Dual-channel on different frequencies (such as 2100/900) will follow later as part of the 3GPP release 9 specification.

DC-HSPA and HSPA Mimo (multiple in, multiple out) will both continue to develop and operators will chose to deploy them based on the topography of their network area and the amount of spectrum they hold. Mimo has the potential to provide better coverage in multi-path (built-up cities) while DCHSPA will provide higher speeds.

The other factor is that operators no longer look at LTE as something that they will have to deploy throughout their entire infrastructure but rather as something that they can deploy in pockets.

Demands on spectrum are increasing as more and more people turn to video and richer applications. Allocation of 2.1 GHz is a must, as is the re-farming of 850 and 900 for 3G as subscribers move off these bands to 2.1.

Away from those bands, 700 MHz is very tempting, a band currently used for analogue TV. Most governments are now turning off those transmitters as television goes digital. Regulators should also look at 2.5 GHz for 3G rather than assume it will be used for WiMax.

"LTE has a TDD (time division duplexing) version. There is a lot of interest in TDD LTE from WiMax operators looking at evolving their networks to LTE. It gives operators who have [WiMAX] spectrum an evolution path," he said. Most LTE (and 3G) deployments use FDD (frequency division duplexing) based on paired frequencies where the uplink and downlink are spaced far apart.

WiMAX versus 3G is not a technology issue, but one of economics. There are more than 4,000 different 3G devices in the market with over 850 million subscribers, a number that is forecast to rise to 1.2 billion by the end of 2012. WiMAX simply does not have the economy of scale and is very much a niche technology, he claims.

2G operators will have to learn a new industry as they move to 3G. In the past, operators were limited to what they could do and all they had to differentiate themselves from one another was price.

With 3G, it is possible to provide a much broader array of applications and we can expect a combination of all-you-can-eat plans and higher priced plans with Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring.