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NewsGlobe: Financial
Mobile WiMAX subscribers to exceed 80 million by 2013, predicts Juniper Research
(Assuming “suitable devices” are available and service differentiation can be achieved)
by Ken Wieland
A new report by Juniper Research calculates the number of
mobile WIMAX subscribers will exceed 80 million by 2013. The
biggest surge in growth, says the research firm, will happen
after 2010. Juniper’s projections assume a wide range of
attractive devices will be available on the market within three
years (at competitive prices), and mobile WiMAX operators will
achieve service differentiation from mobile operators.
“Mobile WiMAX will represent a single-digit proportion of the
global mobile technology base by 2013,” says Howard Wilcox,
author of the report entitled ‘Mobile WiMAX: Global
Opportunities, Strategies & Forecasts (2007-2013)’. “This will
be a tremendous achievement for this new technology
platform, which has recently been boosted by the ITU’s
endorsement of it as an IMT-2000 specification.”
Last October ITU announced IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) as part of
the IMT-2000 family and an official global 3G standard. This
opens the door for many more operators to use mobile
WiMAX (802.16e) within their IMT-2000 spectrum allocation
(and gives the broadband wireless technology more
credibility).
According to figures from the WiMAX Forum, WiMAX
technology had the potential to reach 2.7 billion people
before the ITU announcement. That number now rises to over
4 billion.
In terms of mobile WIMAX service revenue, Juniper
anticipates this will grow to over US$23bn per annum
worldwide by 2013. The top mobile WiMAX markets, says
Juniper, will be the U.S., Japan and South Korea.
“How mobile WiMAX operators differentiate themselves from
mobile operators is key,” adds Wilcox. “The HSPA camp would
probably argue that mobile WiMAX operators can only do that
on price, which would be difficult as flat-rate [3G] packages
are coming onto the market for as little as €20 per month. I
suspect that mobile WiMAX players will have to work closely
with vendors to produce innovative and attractive devices to
achieve differentiation, and exploit the fact that these can be
used for mobile, fixed and nomadic use.”
Juniper’s mobile WiMAX subscriber projections were made
before the announcement by Sprint and Clearwire that they
had ripped up their LOI to coordinate a nationwide mobile
WiMAX rollout across the U.S. (see
Mobile WiMAX suffers U.S. setback). Wilcox does not believe the demise of this
partnership will affect his numbers. “I still expect Sprint to go
ahead with a national mobile WiMAX network,” he says.
According to Juniper there are now over 50 mobile WiMAX
trials around the world. “The biggest thing that has happened
to mobile WIMAX over the last year is that it has gone from
being a technical specification to rollout,” says
Wilcox. “Operators are taking it seriously.”
There is far from consensus in the analyst community,
however, about the strength of the WiMAX business case.
According to a report published last year by Arthur D Little,
which compared such factors as cell radius size and
modulation techniques between WiMAX and HSPA (an
umbrella term for HSDPA and HSUPA), it found that in many
cases WiMAX will have a capex disadvantage of 20-50 percent
— without any speed advantage — compared with HSDPA
(assuming the same size of coverage area as WiMAX).
The business case for mobile WIMAX using the 3.5 GHz
standardized frequency band (as opposed to 2.5 GHz)
appears more vulnerable to a capex showstopper: the higher
the frequency, the shorter the signal distance, which means
more base stations.
But the Juniper report, quoting research from Motorola,
argues that the TCO (total cost of ownership) of a 3.5 GHz
mobile WiMAX network will become similar to one using
2.5 GHz as demand on capacity increases over time. While a
3.5 GHz network will typically require around 30 percent more sites
than 2.5 GHz for the equivalent geographical coverage, it also
means that the 3.5 GHz network starts off with 30 percent more
capacity than its 2.5 GHz counterpart. As a result, the 2.5 GHz
network will require additional network build sooner to cope
with growing data usage.
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