One of the most appealing characteristics of Wi-Max is the allure of a well developed open patent pool which facilitates commercial applications worldwide. Lower costs, broader bandwidth, and highly flexible deployment complete the picture. Even in a global financial downturn, Wi-Max remains a natural fit. The escalating popularity of Internet services from streaming online videos to music search and hi-def movie downloads has been spurred by ADSL. As demand for wireless data, networks grows, networks become increasingly crowded. As the next generation standard of IEEE802.16, 802.16m can provide excellent ultra broadband performance cost-effectively, making Wi-Max one of the best choices for the operators capitalizing on the prevailing interest in broadband Internet.
Clearly, Wi-Max is the ideal technology for basic broadband. Worldwide, the use of broadband falls into two categories; basic broadband and enhanced broadband. Basic broadband enables broadband and provides bedrock for broadband services. From basic we move in a very literal way to mobile broadband. While basic broadband provides a strong foundation, enhanced broadband becomes a catalyst for growth.
Ideal technology for rural areas
Wi-Max has a great potential to connect those areas of the world that remain deprived from benefits of access to information. It’s much more practical to use Wi-Max in rural areas where one base station could serve a wide area. Furthermore, Wi-Max can be practical for backhaul with those kinds of distances between base stations and with the broadband capabilities. Wi-Max base stations are particularly cost-effective in rural areas, because of the range of 50 kilometers. Furthermore, in many of these areas, the need for mobility is limited. In rural regions, not many people have motor transport, so mobility is not an issue.
In rural areas, the application which is of major importance is voice. In these areas, there is no other access method. The only question, then, is how to build up the core. At this point, India has made a huge investment in Class 5 switches, and there is still capacity on those switches. Operators are not going to be anxious to move to softswitches. Therefore, when using Wi-Max for voice applications, operators will need to use gateway products like Commatch 6004 to provide connectivity of Wi-Max end users to existing TDM switches. Using this kind of low-cost solution is an important factor in making Wi-Max a feasible technology for an immediate voice access solution in rural areas. It remains to be seen how inexpensively Wi-Max can be deployed, primarily because today’s installations are fairly small.
On the Indian Market
With urban markets more than saturated, the telecom industry has its eyes set on India?s villages, which have a teledensity of about 26 per cent. For decades, rural India has been plagued by problems of poor infrastructure. These challenges can be significantly overcome by Wi-Max technologies, unleashing opportunities in the various sectors. Huawei has been promoting the use of Wi-Max to meet the global demand for broadband. Huawei?s Wi-Max strategy is therefore clearly based on continuous long-term investment. As long ago as 2000, Huawei began research on 802.16 technology in 2000. For the better part of a decade, the Company has evidenced strong commitment to persistent innovation in support of Wi-Max.
Positive about Future
We believe the Wi-Max is experiencing fast development and maturity, since last year.
Based on our flexible global strategies, by the end of December 2010, Huawei had signed approximately 75 Wi-Max contracts globally and 2 in India – BSNL rural and BSNL urban in Rajasthan. Confident in our ability to assist operators realize ever greater business goals, we will spare no efforts in continuing our support of Wi-Max.
2011 will be a year of network modernization and we are very excited about this opportunity. With our global leadership in building the next generation transport, we are collaborating with service providers and providing tailored transport solutions
