WiMAX for Corporate Telephony/PDAs/smart phones/Portable PCs

Hi all,

Wonder if I could have your opinions on something. Lots of enterprises have an internal telephone network, but now are also providing employees with mobile/cellular phones so they can work away from the office.

At the same time, most of these voice networks are "traditional" telephone switches. These are evolving towards voice over ip (VoIP). In the last few years, push email has proven immensely popular. Does WiMAX present a solution to these developments?

- deploy a WiMAX base station in the enterprise - use a "smart" phone with WiMAX and GSM/GPRS/3G capabilities - while at or near the office, the "smart" phone can use the WiMAX network to carry calls, as well as data, for example push email. This would be "free". - while away from the office, switch to GSM/GPRS/3G

Advantages; - users need only one phone/device (not a desk phone, and a mobile/cellular phone, and a Blackberry) - develop a VoIP infrastructure to replace traditional "switched" voice network (if phones resemble cellular/mobile phones, are rechargeable with days of bettery life, there's no need to worry about Power over Ethernet (PoE), air conditioning/uninterruptible power in wiring closets, etc which makes switching to VoIP/PoE expensive and difficult) - WiMAX supports QoS at the MAC layer, making it better suited to VoIP/video, etc - mobile WiMAX means a single base station could cover the entire business "campus", easier than many Wi-Fi access points. - many employees live close to work, so may well be able to use corporate network from home for "free". (assuming 30 mile coverage!) - Intel envisions incorporating WiMAX in future revisions of Centrino, making PC support "semi-ubiquitious"

Am I barking up the wrong tree? Would the big names (Nokia, Ericsson, and now Cisco/Avaya/Nortel) see a future in this? Intel is clearly very optimistic about this technology.

Tried googling for perspectives on this, but can't find anything relevant. Think this is achievable from a technical perspective, but how likely is it?

Kindest regards,

Anwar

Reply to
amahmood5
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No.What would your tutors think.

Reply to
Rob

I'm not a student, unless you count the University of Life ;-) I'm after other ICT expert's opinions. A lot of this stuff is new but related, with no clarity from the ICT business. There are lots of major implications on how a large organisation, like my employer, my choose to deliver ICT services to it's staff and students.

Reply to
amahmood5

Nope. It presents and enabling technology. Basically you can do VoIP over anything that supports the bandwidth. If you want, you can do VoIP over an ISDN B1 line. WiMax is just one of many wireless data formats that can be used for VoIP.

Since when is "push" email been proven immensely popular? Just about all the push technology vendors have gone bankrupt because of the lack of a suitable business and revenue model.

Yeah. Just don't forget about the little details like RF propogation, bulding penetration, interference mitigation, and reliability. I really like the term "deploy" as it implies that everything will work when you turn it on.

WiMax is a potential competitor to cellular data (1xRTT, EV-DO, HSDPA, etc). With WiMax, your corporate user will be able to make calls for free with the company WiMax system, and metered rate from the cellular service provider. At this time, free wide area calling on the cellular networks has taken all the potential cost benifits out of VoIP on cellular data. Also not that you can replace the WiMax with

802.11b/g or Bluetooth in the phone and get the same results.

Yeah, that's the plan behind the dual mode phones. Of course the cellular providers are doing everything they can to prevent the user from running VoIP on their instruments. For example, Verizon disables all of the Bluetooth OBEX profiles, half the Bluetooth features, prevents the installation of an 802.11 card, and generally does everything it can to cripple the instrument to promote its own services.

Sure. However, most users can live with just voice and don't need the expensive data service.

The average turnover on cellular handsets is 18 months. In effect, the handsets are almost free. Why would a company pay a substantial amount of money for a single instrument to replace an almost free phone and possibly a cheap PDA with 802.11b/g? I don't see the savings with internal VoIP to justify the added cost of the instrument.

This reeks of the old debate between the dumb network and the smart network. In my never humble opinion, I don't need a smart network. Just a smart phone. The phone and the user are perfectly capeable of making intelligent decisions and do not require a telco or cellular intrastructure to do it for them.

*ALL* 802.11b/g wireless and WiMax are done at the MAC layer. Note the word "ALL". QoS can be done on layer 2, 3, or both, but is mostly commonly done in wireless on layer 2. No benifit.

Coverage will be improved by an increase in base station power output. However, unless the client radios have a similar increase in transmit power, range will be largely the same as 2.4GHz 802.11b/g. To it's credit, WiMax is more efficient than 802.11b/g, so one should be able to cram more users into a give bandwidth.

Also, there are severe limitations to trying to cover a large "campus" with a single access point. The big one is that in building coverage below the central access point is really awful. Another is that big tall antennas on high buildings tend to pickup interference from neighborhing systems.

The 30 mile coverage is science fiction. References and calcs on request.

Well, actually one could do 30 miles with proper antennas. It's not going to happen with a minimal cell phone antenna. Visualize your corporate user plugging their conglomerated WiMax cell phone into a

24dBi pizza dish on their roof or vehicle. I don't think so.

They also visualize SDF (software defined radio) and WUSB (wireless USB) using UWB (ultra wide band). They're also behind MIMO as the answer to all problems. If Intel's record of delivering their 802.11b chips (which they bought from Philips) 2 years late is any indication of their support, I would not consider this to be an advantage.

Reality and press releases are mutually exclusive. These companies will claim to support any technology that pumps up their stock and gets them the attention of the press. If it shows any sign of failure, they will kill it instantly. Want to invest in some Intel Bubble Memory modules? As a rule of thumb, products are ready for prime time 18 months after the initial chipset samples arrive.

This is not a technical discussion. It's about industry politics and trying to predict the direction in which the technology will stagger. I suggest you read some of the articles at:

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a few on WiMax. Hopefully that will give you a modest dose of reality. One interesting point that Andy makes is that no data only service has every made money (except for a short period when the one way pager service providers were claiming profits).

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Jeff,

Many thanks for your reply. Your reply is exactly the dose of reality that seems absent from so many press releases and IT journal articles about this kind of stuff. Portable/roaming WiMAX would seem to be impractical. This goes a long way to explaining why Nokia, a founding member, left in the middle of 2004 (only to rejoin the following month, apparently due to "peer" pressure because everyone else was hyping it

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Anecdotal evidence indicates our students have phones no older than 1 year, but 802.11b/g+3G, which Nokia is putting money behind, would appear to be the medium term platform to consider. I'll keep an eye on WiMAX, but it's clearly not the panacea the industry appears to be hyping.

Kind regards,

Anwar

Reply to
amahmood5

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