Communication lines blurring
He says WiMAX allows operators and service providers to provide customers with dedicated or shared bandwidth options and charge according to the level of service required. In a shared environment, companies would be sharing bandwidth with others but communicating over a private link, referred to as a virtual private network, says Nel.
“We see this as the first wave of use of WiMAX.”
It will open the market to service providers that will lease bandwidth from major carriers such as Telkom, the SNO or Sentech and sell services on top of it, he says.
WiMAX will initially provide a fixed service to a customer’s premises, but eventually users will be able to buy a modem to connect to WiMAX services on the move at speeds that will depend on how the service provider manages bandwidth, he says.
The 3,5 gigahertz (GHz) waveband used internationally for WiMAX still needs to be allocated in SA and there is a question mark over which operators and service providers will be granted spectrum licences, says Nel.
He says there is a limited amount of total radio spectrum available due to global agreements and regulations, and certain frequencies are allocated to different technologies such as microwave, broadcasting and GSM, and a certain spectrum has been set aside for new technologies.
In SA, WiFi, which is used by wireless local area networks and hotspots, uses the unlicensed 2,4 GHz frequency with other radio devices such as two-way radios, remote controls, Bluetooth and some cordless phones.
“If spectrum is over-allocated it will create interference between wireless services,” says Nel.
He says worldwide there is a drive to allocate specific wireless frequencies so that the equipment used to deliver services can be used internationally to achieve economies of scale and reduce customer prices, but this does not always happen. For example, the US has allocated the 5,4 GHz and 5,7 GHz higher-frequency bands for WiFi, and Asian countries are using different frequencies for it.
“It is difficult to align frequencies around the world because different countries have different requirements,” says Nel.
For example, Europe has plenty of wired infrastructure and countries in that region do not need as much wireless communication, but in SA and the rest of Africa it is the other way around, he says.
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