FiMAX: How Mobile Do We Really Need To Be?

In the third world, mobility is in the eyes of the beholder.

 

Jeff Paine used to show a picture of a technician on a bicycle with a roll of fiber he was deploying in China. He was in front of the headquarters of UT Starcom. It was a beautiful picture of contrasts. State of the Art meets State of the Nation.

 

This was the point of Dr. Kalaichelvan, CEO of Eion, when we talked about fixed wireless having a lot more market than people give it credit for. Eion supports WiFi to WiMAX solutions that enable the backhaul and they have had success around the world

 

Mobile WiMAX serves a purpose for Intel in competing with the ARM chips in the mobile market. In many parts of the world that battle is far removed from the requirements, of enabling communication where there was none or very little. The stimulus package terms of unserved and underserved has deeper meaning in the third world.

 

Fixed WiMAX has the advantage of being more than a competitor for DSL, but a solution for the nomadic user. We also know the world is going to become more specific in its communication strategy we can expect that certain applications are going to rise up and dominate specific technologies.

 

Strangley more Internet like means that there are more chances for specific applications solutions. Fixed WiMAX has more markets than first meets the eye including, oil and gas, homeland security, and, of course, VoIP.

 

One particular application that has been a boom to fixed WiMAX is surveillance with companies like Axxcelera offering full duplex systems to support national strategies to monitor the threats in the market.

 

Surveillance, though, is the tip of the iceberg of opportunities in the government sector as we head toward more mobile machine-to-machine or M2M applications. The use of fixed wireless has advantages in operational costs. As a solution for nomadic users the algorithms for mobility, the complexity of base station roaming and provisioning are reduced.

 

On the device side, WiMAX mobility will benefit from the fixed side in its plans for provisioning. Unlike LTE – which is going to co-exist with 3G technologies on many of the devices and supporting multiple frequencies, and use the SIMs and IMS to connect with the backend systems – WiMAX has a flatter interface that will utilize more Internet-based support strategies.

 

If a network engineer was tasked with building the infrastructure for use for future applications beyond voice calls, fixed WiMAX has immediate benefits in backhaul and has opportunities that make it the natural selection for future device driven applications.