Mobile WiMAX and its Shrinking Ecosystem
Over the past months a series of events and decisions by leading wireless equipment suppliers raises doubts about which and how many among them will be devoting significant efforts and investments, and giving high priority to the development and commercialization of future generations of mobile WiMAX equipment beyond current TDD systems.
For example, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) announced in early July that instead of its own WiMAX base stations it will resell Alvarion’s latest mobile WiMAX 802.16e equipment to its current and prospective WiMAX customers.
NSN’s majority owner Nokia, the world’s largest mobile handset supplier, also discontinued its WiMAX terminal device (the N810 Internet tablet) at the beginning of 2009. Alcatel-Lucent has been cutting back on its investments in WiMAX, and focusing more on LTE development while maintaining its CDMA2000 and GSM/WCDMA revenues as long as possible.
Motorola, an early advocate of mobile WiMAX has also decided to increase spending on LTE development while decreasing that on WiMAX. Nortel is completely out of the WiMAX business and now its wireless network assets and operations are being acquired out of its bankruptcy by Ericsson, which has long had a single-minded commitment to LTE for its 4G technology.
Regulators and policy makers who are considering allocating substantial amounts of spectrum in which they expect or want to favor the deployment of WiMAX networks, that will inevitably first be implemented in TDD or unpaired spectrum allocations, should be increasingly concerned about the likely outcome of such allocations.
The deployment of such WiMAX networks on a large scale with the capability of providing national and international coverage and interoperability is becoming increasingly remote, especially if they are not likely to be able to rely on a long term development road map being pursued by a powerful group of vendors for their future upgrading and enhancement.
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