Motorola’s Santiago on Mobile WiMAX

This Added Insight Q&A accompanies Out of the Lab, Into the Real World , the cover story from xchange's December issue . To read more about Sprint Nextel Corp.'s initiatives to bring 4G into people's lives, click here .

A Q&A on mobile WiMAX with Motorola Inc.’s Juan Santiago, senior director of product management and strategy for the networks and enterprise division.

XC: How do you define 4G?

JS: Well, it’s a true mobility system that allows advanced IP services and full multimedia to be seamlessly handed off from base station to base station. There’s a lot of confusion as to what exactly it is from a technical standpoint, although there is a formal definition in the ITU. But something funny happened on the way to 4G, and it’s no longer just LTE and so on. Now you have things like WiMAX changing the scope.

XC: Speaking of WiMAX, how do you expect that market to play out initially?

JS: For cell operators with no 3G services, for wireline telcos and cablecos, WiMAX is a way to get to broadband wireless. Also, we originally expected the first use cases strictly to be fixed, but what Sprint Nextel Corp. has done is radically accelerate something that we thought was a few years off. Now, we will see full mobility with WiMAX almost off the bat.

XC: What are some of the challenges for operators that WiMAX will help overcome?

JS: The IP business cases we see today offer all-you-can-eat access. It’s a service people sell. But it’s difficult to maintain that economically. However, WiMAX boosts the capacity and offers spectrum efficiency, which translates into a deduction of opex costs on the base station side. You end up with four times the performance for about half the cost.

Also, with mobility comes device volume, but the cost of CPE has always been difficult to overcome. It’s a fixed cost per subscriber. With 802.16e there will be multiple chip vendors. In the cellular world, we have an intellectual property situation where technology is concentrated in the hands of a few, and that raises the costs for everyone. With WiMAX, no one vendor will corner the market.

XC: What will the WiMAX device market look like?

JS: A cell phone has a certain value and it gets subsidized in part by the operator. With WiMAX we can embed chips in all kinds of devices, like music players and cameras and gaming consoles. So, the subsidy model goes away, because those are things the consumers perceive as having a higher value, and are willing to pay for.

XC: Is spectrum allocation a problem for WiMAX?

JS: Right now we have profiles in the 2.5GHz, 3.5GHz and 2.3GHz bands. There’s a reason for that. WiMAX provides great capacities, but you need a large chunk of spectrum to achieve that. Those holding AWS spectrum [from the recent FCC auction, of which T-Mobile USA was the big winner] just simply don’t have big enough swaths to make WiMAX work. The way AWS transmits and receives signals is called duplexing – you send one signal up to the radio tower, which sends another back to you in response on another frequency. That takes up a lot of spectrum.

XC: Given the existing profiles, how can emerging players tap into WiMAX?

JS: In the U.S. right now it’s very tight. Yes, 2.5GHz is a big, broad band, but there are a lot of owners of small sections, mostly schools and universities. Other than that, Sprint can access 85 percent of it. Then there’s Clearwire Corp. Some sort of wholesale relationship or MVNO model could offer new entrants access to the 2.5GHz if those companies decide to offer that.

Then the 3.5GHz is used by the military in this country, so that’s a non-starter. And the 2.3GHz band is owned by the RBOCs and cablecos, but the rules for that band make it difficult to provide mobility. It’s a narrower band, so they have to worry about interference from the neighbors.

But new profiles could certainly open up. The operators on the path of the 3GPP, doing CDMA and EV-DO, are showing an incredible amount of interest in WiMAX, and don’t discount the wireline operators. If there is enough demand, the equipment will be submitted for certification.

Motorola Inc. www.motorola.com

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