Business Prospects Of Wimax — An ISP perspective

The prospects for WiMAX technology as a viable income opportunity tend to be the subject of debate amidst numerous actual or perceived challenges. Applying these innovative insights will make these arguments and challenges disappear.

Unlike most people’s expectation of rural deployments, you might consider targeting SME’s in cities. There are various reasons behind this:

o We have a growing demand in business for bandwidth capable of carrying symmetrical traffic, for voice, applications and uploading of larger files.

o There’s a small but growing need for separated last mile services. Currently, however many wired companies you have, all of them utilize the incumbents’ last mile infrastructure depending on its nearest telephone exchange location if you do not have bought a costly dig in the next nearest exchange. This may lead to single points of failure along with the potential for business communications for being down for several days, just like happen say with a cable duct fire somewhere within the spoke.

Your even worst environment is a very high-density urban area with plenty of interfering buildings, has multiple fibre networks, ADSL and SDSL in each and every exchange, hundreds of competing suppliers, a restrictive property planning regime with many ‘listed’ buildings, and no spare spectrum for FWA except the general public 5.8GHz band.

To make this happen, because of the scale of competition using their company companies, your model needs to be disruptive. It has to offer stuff that businesses need (like QoS, toll-quality VoIP, high-quality video, symmetric bandwidth, higher capacities and network separation etc) at a lower cost.

This means stripping all unnecessary cost out of the model. You’ll reap the benefits of a quality RF planning tool which gives which you major edge on other operators – mapping exactly where it is possible to provide service, how you can set up the client antenna, what bandwidth may be accomplished etc, according to your base-stations. You should know the way in which to tune base-stations to protect yourself from blackspots – without resorting to an RF team.

Although Wi-Fi and WiMAX frequently get confused, they can be quite different from an operators perspective. Wi-Fi is plug and spend playtime with no treatments for the wireless interface. WiMAX will not be, it behaves a lot more like a carrier ATM network. Wi-Fi is created into laptops and handsets, whereas FWA WiMAX requires larger standalone receivers (yours should mount on customer rooftops for optimum utilty).

The benefit is that WiMAX is quite spectrally efficient, a minimum of 50% in addition than 3G networks, so that it has better data-carrying capabilities in limited spectrum. All Wi-Fi shares precisely the same public spectrum – WiMAX perform across an assortment. Wi-Fi provides service on the selection of 100m, your WiMAX should provide 10Mbps over the choice of 1.3km from the base-station non-line-of sight.

WiMAX can create carrier-class networks, Wi-Fi cannot – not with mesh networks. However, Wi-Fi with WiMAX backhaul gets several of the great things about WiMAX because backhaul like VPN’s. A lot of WiMAX customer equipment include Wi-Fi integrated.

Don’t await mobile (802.16e) WiMAX – your knowledge about vendors could be that they are around fourteen months to two years behind on their promised delivery dates, and further delays could afflict key requirements. Don’t expect adequate 802.16e equipment to build a network with until late 2007 in the earliest, no usable CPE until 2008 – because it is mobile life of the battery is necessary which will make the time to get right.

You’ll find sufficient markets for FWA now. It is important is usually to grab the scarce resources first – spectrum etc – to make them yours. Except in those undeveloped countries with no mobile operator, mobile WiMAX will be really tricky to establish against incumbent operators with large installed bases as the areas covered are very important to customers – which is not a consideration for FWA.

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