WiMAX Reality

Peter Hendrick

AirSpeed Telecom
IBEC 27th January 2010

So, what have you heard about WiMAX?

Can deliver connectivity @ distances >30km Can deliver broadbands speeds >40Mbps Can deliver voice services Can deliver Video services Offers mobility What is the reality?

Pre-WiMAX Alternatives
Proprietary Point to Multipoint Solutions: Alvarion OFDM @ 3.5GHz Navini SCDMA @ 2.4/3.5GHz Flarion Flash-OFDM @ 0.45 / 1.9 / 2.1GHz Target Marget: DSL white spots / Alternative ISP's / Mobile Data (High speed trains) Positives: Good alternative to lower speed ADSL (Navini) Good alternative to higher speed ADSL and symetrical DSL (Alvarion) Real high speed mobile data (Flarion) Good Non Line of Sight performance Negatives: Proprietary One vendor for both Base Stations and CPE Expensive Base Stations 50-80k USD / CPE ~ $500 No long term evolution fork lift of BTS and CPE

What is WiMAX?
WiMAX is: Acronym for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. Based on Wireless MAN technology. A wireless technology optimized for the delivery of IP centric services over a wide area. A scaleable wireless platform for constructing alternative and complementary broadband networks. A certification that denotes interoperability of equipment built to the IEEE 802.16 or compatible standard. The IEEE 802.16 Working Group develops standards that address two types of usage models:

A fixed usage model (IEEE 802.16-2004). A portable usage model (IEEE 802.16e).

What does WiMAX offer for the operator?

Equipment Standardisation: Shared proprietary IPR: Improved performance: Major chip manufactorers: New vendors: Equivalent to GSM / W-CDMA i.e. Antenna Beamforming Throughput, latency, NLOS, Mobility (Handover) Intel, Beceem, Sequens, Samsung, GCT for CPE Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola

Infrastructure savings:

Lower Base Station cost due to competitive market

Subscriber acquisition savings: Volume Market for CPE / Zero CPE cost (Laptops) Network Evolution Path: 802.16m and beyond

What does WiMAX offer the Residential / Business User?

Extended coverage (rural and urban) Resilience to copper / fibre Premium SLA capability - Reliability that previous proprietary systems did not deliver Symmetrical service No Line rental VoIP and Data Lower bundled cost?

Technical - things to know!

WiMAX 802.16e is TDD based system i.e. Same TX/RX channel 802.16e Rel 1.0 supports 10MHz channel allocation (now) - delivering approximately 32Mbps aggregate per sector 802.16e Rel 1.5 - 2x20MHz channel, TDD / FDD, 289Mbps - Availability 2010

802.16m (Rel 2.0) 2011/12, TDD/FDD, upto 100MHz channel, Goal of speeds of 1Gbps (fixed) / 100Mbps (mobile)
802.16e has evolution path to 802.16m 802.16m potentially TDD LTE Advanced, 20-100MHz allocation?

Technical - things to know about Downlink!

Advanced radio features of WiMAX 802.16e: Antenna Cyclic Delay Diversity improved system gain & coverage.
Simple time delay to each stream, every transmission element contains a cyclic shifted version of the OFDM data transmission.

MIMO A improved system gain and coverage

Transmits a single data stream from multiple Antennas that is encoded with a STBC (SpaceTime Block Code).

MIMO B improved capacity per sector

Leverages SM (Spatial Multiplexing) by utilizing two or more multiple antenna elements at the base station and MS (Mobile Station) for processing independent data streams.

Beamforming
Beamforming creates a narrow antenna beam directed to a particular subscriber while signal strength is retained along the signal edge. Two forms of Beamforming: AOA (Angle of Arrival) Intelligent (mathematical-beamforming)

Downlink System Performance for 802.16e

Technical - things to know about Uplink!

Maximal-ratio Combining (MRC)
Maximal-ratio Combining (MRC) is a receive diversity scheme.

Collaborative Spatial Multiplexing (CSM)

Couple geographically-separated mobile stations (also known as pairing) in such a way that two transmitters are spatially diverted, so that the base station receiver can resolve the two incoming data streams.

Leading WiMAX Vendors

Alcatel-Lucent Alvarion Cisco Huawei Intel Motorola Base Station 2.3 / 2.5 / 3.5GHz Base Station/CPE - 2.3 / 2.5 / 3.5GHz Base Station/CPE - 2.3 / 2.5 / 3.5GHz Base Station/CPE/Cards/ Handsets - 2.3 / 2.5G / 3.5GHz Chipsets (CPE, Cards, Laptops etc) Base Station/CPE - 2.3 / 2.5 / 3.5GHz

ZTE
ZyXEL

Base Station 2.3 / 2.5 / 3.5GHz

Base Station/CPE - 2.3 / 2.5 / 3.5GHz

Summary
WiMAX has a clear value in broadband delivery Enhanced Coverage Resilience / Diversity Cloud Symmetrical / Asymmetrical SLA flexibility Education Airspeed Telecom recent deployment

Our own commitment national deployments