Huawei Technologies

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Experts Forum Experts Forum

Mr. Ron Resnick is President and Chairman of the WiMAX Forum, a position he has held since 2004. He is employed by Intel as an executive member of the Mobile Wireless Group.

WiMAX Forum aiming further and higher

These are very exciting times for WiMAX. With hundreds of commercial networks in operation today, WiMAX has achieved the fastest market ramp of any wireless WAN technology in history. The WiMAX Forum currently tracks 559 WiMAX deployments in 147 countries estimated to cover more than 620 million people across the globe. More than 130 devices and 60 base stations have been certified by the WiMAX Forum for the 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz and 3.5GHz bands. WiMAX networks are rapidly expanding in North America, Europe and Asia. In Japan, UQ President Mr. Takashi recently said, We will have 50% of the geography covered with WiMAX by 2010 and install some 20,000 base stations by 2012.
By Ron Resnick

WiMAX ecosystem
iMAX technology enjoys the support of a robust and thriving ecosystem of companies representing the entire mobile Internet ecosystem from silicon to content. It is led by the WiMAX Forum, a not-for-profit consortium of industry leaders such as Huawei and Intel, all committed to enabling wireless broadband everywhere. With hundreds of WiMAX networks active in almost 150 countries, the WiMAX Forum and its members are actively promoting the global adoption of 4G wireless broadband. The WiMAX Forum is passionate about ensuring the interoperability of nextgeneration wireless broadband products and services. With a focus on product certification, the Forum is dedicated to advancing the converging efforts of the global computing, Internet and mobile industries. The development and global adoption of WiMAX is driven by some of the largest and most important technology companies in the world. Organizations such as Huawei and Intel are major contributors, adding their size, research and technology

to motivate the industry. According to a recent study by DellOro Group, Huawei has grown to be one of the worlds largest WiMAX network providers. With toptier network deployments across the globe, Huawei enables both greenfield WiMAX operators such as US-based Clearwire, and incumbent mobile carriers such as Globe Telecom in the Philippines to deliver nextgeneration wireless broadband in any environment. These networks would not be effective without the support of a robust device ecosystem. Intel has played a key role in the development of WiMAX technology, incorporating the 802.16 standard into its traditional Wi-Fi chips to provide low-cost embedded wireless broadband connectivity. Currently there are well over

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100 notebooks and netbooks with Intels embedded WiMAX technology providing connectivity in areas previously untouched by broadband. In addition to the value of the ir market presence, Huawei and Intel both provide something vital to the WiMAX ecosystem: IPR. Both companies are founding members of an organization called the Open Patent Alliance (OPA). The OPA is an industry first, formed to provide an intellectual property rights (IPR) solution to support the development and adoption of WiMAX worldwide. The OPA is developing a WiMAX Patent Pool to deliver the goals of lower cost, transparency, and predictability in IPR, which in turn will drive the adoption of WiMAX and enable more 4G OEMs and ODMs to enter this market segment.

Open Retail Certification Initiative

The WiMAX Forums Open Retail Certification Initiative is structured to enable and increase the availability of WiMAX devices while reducing the technical and capital stresses on WiMAX network operators. The initiative will begin by increasing the tests available through

WiMAX For um Cer tification. This new set of tests includes robust radiated performance test (RPT) and operator interoperability test (OIOT) aimed at a gradual reduction of the burden of internal operator testing overhead. Once implemented, these tests will ensure device interoperability at the level of performance operators require. The initiative also includes a new process called Certification Version Signaling (CVS). This requires the installation of an OMA-DM server on the operators premises; however, once installed it will connect to the WiMAX Forums CVS database allowing the operator to identify, understand the feature set, and automatically accept or deny network access to Open Retail Certified devices over the air. The programs final goal is to create a viable framework to enable true retail sale of WiMAX devices worldwide. Consumers will have the ability to purchase WiMAX devices at retail without any preloaded operator information with the assurance that these devices are interoperable with any participating WiMAX network. They

will then be able to subscribe to any participating WiMAX operator through their new devices, which will be configured and serviced by each operator instantly over the air. If a participating device has a broad feature set that will not be completely enabled by a participating operator, that operator will be able to automatically configure the device and immediately notify the user of feature availability over the air. These benefits will only be available to operators that are WiMAX Forum members and participate in the Open Retail Certification Initiative.

WiMAX 1 - IEEE 802.16e enhanced

On April 8th, 2010, the WiMAX Forum made a very exciting announcement

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Experts Forum
WiMAX Forum aiming further and higher in New Delhi, India. This announcement outlines the efforts of the WiMAX Forum to drive a broad-based industry initiative to accelerate the WiMAX 1 technology roadmap to meet the explosive market demand that WiMAX operators are seeing across the globe. With an ever-increasing demand for mobile WiMAX services and average monthly data consumption in the 7-10GB/ month range for many WiMAX operators, the WiMAX Forum is driving an initiative to accelerate additional advanced Release 1 features for certification in the second half of 2010. As part of this initiative, the WiMAX Forum will add new system profiles for certification later this year, innovative features to double peak data rates and increase average and cell-edge end-user performance by 50%. Enhancements under development include support for additional MIMO antennae on the base stations (4 transmit antennae instead of 2), higherorder (64 QAM) modulation on the uplink, downlink beamforming, and improved fractional frequency reuse (FFR) to increase performance in reuse-1 deployments while ensuring multi-vendor interoperability. The WiMAX Forum is pioneering new levels of open network interoperability and performance in 2010 by driving Release 1 technology forward to meet the needs of operators concerned about future constraints brought about by their own success. With the completion of IEEE Standard 802.16m later this year, the WiMAX Forum is also set to expedite WiMAX 2 technology into the hands of operators and consumers. Because the market is already seeing 802.16m products in development, the WiMAX Forum is preparing for certification of Release 2 products in late 2011. foundation for the next decade of 4G WiMAX has changed the technology. The standard provides for huge peak (zero path loss) transmission rates face of the communications up to 300Mbps in a 20MHz downlink industry, and it is still on its channel and even lower latency. With the aggregation of multiple RF carriers, way toward mass consumer wider effective channel bandwidths of up to 100MHz are possible. Wider channels adoption. With 568 WiMAX and higher-order MIMO antenna networks in 148 countries, configurations enable the scaling of capacity to many times that of the most analyst firm Infonetics advanced wireless systems today. In s u m m a r y, t h e I E E E St a n d a rd Research forecasts that, 802.16m is expected to be completed despite the global economic in the second half of 2010 and the WiMAX Forum is fast-tracking profiling climate, WiMAX adoption and certification activities to prepare for WiMAX 2 product certification in late will explode over the next 2011. few years. With an estimated 130 million WiMAX A promising future ahead subscribers by 2014 , WiMAX WiMAX has changed the face of the is changing the global model communications industry, and it is still on its way toward mass consumer adoption. for broadband. With 568 WiMAX networks in 148 encouraging news related to WiMAX 2 (802.16m). On April 12th, 2010, it was announced that the entire WiMAX ecosystem came together to accelerate the availability of WiMAX Release 2. Building upon the success of WiMAX Release 1, the WiMAX 2 Collaboration Initiative (WCI) has been formed to accelerate the WiMAX 2 ecosystem. The objectives of the WCI include: technology collaboration and joint performance benchmarking; joint testing of 4G applications over WiMAX 2 solutions; early network-level interoperability testing; and plug-tests to prepare for WiMAX Forum certification. WiMAX 2 meets the ITU requirements for IMT-Advanced, delivering higher system capacity peak rates of more than 300Mbps lower latency and increased VoIP capacity. WiMAX 2 is based on IEEE Standard 802.16m, which is documented to meet the ITUs IMT-Advanced requirements, delivering dramatic improvements in coverage and capacity that will form the

WiMAX 2 - IEEE 802.16m update

In addition to the recent announcements on the acceleration of WiMAX 1, we also have some very 5 JUN 2010 . ISSUE 56

countries, analyst firm Infonetics Research forecasts that, despite the global economic climate, WiMAX adoption will explode over the next few years. With an estimated 130 million WiMAX subscribers by 2014, WiMAX is changing the global model for broadband. An excellent example of the success of WiMAX is Russian WiMAX operator Yota. As the first WiMAX operator to l a u n c h a d u a l - m o d e G S M / Wi M A X phone, Yota signed up 350,000 subscribers within its first 6 months of commercial service, and subscriptions continue at a rate of 3,000 per day. One of the most important discoveries Yota has made is that WiMAX changes the way people use mobile broadband. Its users each consume an average of 10.3GB of data per month. This is 20% higher than local ADSL and cable rivals, as well as 100 times more than 3G subscribers. WiMAX is a true mobile broadband technology, and it really does change the way its users think about mobility. As WiMAX continues to mature, many more success stories like Yota will come along. Editor: Long Ji longji@huawei.com