marketing at Intel, who has called for some kind of “harmonization” or “unification” of two upcoming 4G wireless technologies, WiMAX and LTE (Long Term Evolution). 

Intel, of course, has been trying to do for WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) what it did for WiFi – insert it into every laptop in the world. (Intel’s “Echo Peak” initiative seeks to combine WiFi and WiMAX chipsets so that laptops can run both.) Sprint and others are also trying to bring WiMAX to the U.S. via its Clearone initiative. WiMAX has a far greater range and capacity than WiFi, and there are variants of it (801.16e and 802.16m) for mobile users. WiMax was originally described as “WiFi on steroids” since WiFi has a short range (about 300 feet) and WiMAX is really more of a MAN (Metropolitan Area Access) technology with a range of about 25 to 30 miles from a base station, though real-world testing indicates that 4 to 8 miles appears to be the true range, with a bandwidth ranging from 1 to 10 Mbps. 

Maloney’s WiMAX/LTE conciliatory comments echo those of Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, who would also like the two wireless entities to somehow be combined or be made super-interoperable. 

LTE is supported by Alcatel-Lucent, China Mobile, FranceTelecom/Orange, Huawei, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, NTT, Samsung, Telecom Italia, T-Mobile, Verizon and ZTE. Unlike WiMAX or WiFi, LTE is not a standard but a project resulting in a new evolved release 8 of the UMTS wireless standard. The resulting architecture is called EPS (Evolved Packet System) and comprises E-UTRAN (Evolved UTRAN) on the access side and EPC (Evolved Packet Core) on the core side. Thus, LTE technology has its roots in the mobile phone world, sitting as it does at the end of an evolutionary path that starts with GSM/GPRS, moves through EDGE and the widely deployed HSPA (High Speed Packet Access), the later actually being quite a reasonable competitor to both WiMAX and LTE, and has garnered interest by AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S. Still, LTE is expected to delivery higher speeds than either HSPA or WiMAX, achieving 100 Mbps download and 50 Mbps uploads bandwidths.

LTE in any event won’t really be deployed on a large scale for several years, perhaps not until 2012. WiMAX should by that time already have a beachhead in the U.S. and Japan. Indeed, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that 10 million people would be using WiMAX by the end of 2008, and then the figures would skyrocket into the hundreds of millions a couple of years after that.

Harmonizing WiMAX and LTE is not such a preposterous idea. Motorola has made it known that 85 percent of its WiMAX R&D and technology for WiMAX equipment can be re-used in LTE equipment. Both WiMAX and LTE have the goal of achieving 100 Mbps mobile and 1 Gbps fixed-nomadic bandwidths as set by ITU for 4G NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Network) systems through the adaptive use of MIMO-AAS and smart, granular network topologies. 3GPP LTE and WiMAX variant “m” are concentrating much effort on MIMO-AAS (Mobile Networked Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output, Adaptive Antenna System, also known as MNM, a technique first demonstrated at Stanford University in 1994 that uses multiple antennas and adaptive signal processing to send and receive wireless signals at high bandwidths), mobile multi-hop relay networking and related technologies needed to deliver 10X and higher Co-Channel reuse multiples.

Wide area broadband networks will soon be jockeying for position in the market, and the idea of unifying two of the most advanced technologies is intriguing, if not necessarily practical.
 

Source:TMCnet