In a voice hoarse from a day of talking, the man in charge of
Sprint's 4G future dissects the physics of mobile WiMAX, explains the
economics of the Sprint network being built on it, analyzes the need
for a radically simple user experience and explains what it all means
for his grandchildren in England.
Londoner Barry West, formerly of Nextel, is now Sprint's CTO and
president of its recently created 4G business unit, charged with
spending at least US$2.5 billion to deploy 802.16e mobile WiMAX base
stations, covering 100,000 points of presence, by the end of 2008. That
deployment will start in late 2007, delivering 1M to 3Mbps service to
subscribers.
Sprint will be competing with Clearwire, which reaped $900 million in
new funds, including $600 million from Intel Capital, to extend its
wireless broadband net and migrate to mobile WiMAX.
Later this year, Sprint will launch some early campus-style 16e
deployments for selected enterprise customers, West says. He's
meeting with a medical center while here and talked recently with a
company that is evaluating mobile WiMAX to cover a massive
manufacturing plant.
These early deployments will use field programmable chipsets, rather
than the more sophisticated chipsets, called ASICs, due next year. As a
result, these campus deployments won't be fully mobile - supporting
two-way video streams between the network and a car, for example.
Most of these trials will have as many as four or five base stations
and users will connect via PCMCIA cards in laptops, West says. "A lot
of people are real enthusiastic about having an 'Internet anywhere'
experience," he says.
West sounds almost utopian as he explains the big picture of what all
this will mean. WiMAX-based 4G networks will make possible pervasive,
immediate, visual interactions that he believes will make for a better,
and more humane, world. "It's hard to stay mad at people when
you're in close communications with each other," he says. A mobile
WiMAX network, with the bandwidth to support voice and video, will make
such closeness possible, he says.
He describes a not-too-distant future in which his daughter can set up
a small digital camera and a companion, compact flat screen so he can
view his granddaughter's recital in real time. "I can literally be
there with her," he says.
But there's nothing sentimental in his analysis of the challenges
facing Sprint in its plan to create a nationwide mobile WiMAX net.
"WiMAX creates a 10-fold improvement in the price-per-bit," he
says. "That made possible by the fact it uses a wider channel."
West says that CDMA networks today use a 1.25-MHz channel, which under
optimal conditions can deliver 4 bits per hertz, or about 5Mbps at the
base station. By contrast, WiMAX uses a 10-MHz channel, with a total of
40Mbps.
And WiMAX chips benefit from the economies of price/performance known
as Moore's Law, compared to the older Code Division Multiple Access
(CDMA) technology. The result: WiMAX is one-tenth the cost per bit of
CDMA. "It's as simple as that," West says. "It's physics."
Sprint's plan is to have 100,000 points of presence enabled with
WiMAX service by the end of 2008. The network will be an overlay on the
company's existing CDMA EV-DO 1x cellular net. Subscribers will be
able to use either network, depending on coverage and services, through
network cards and eventually through integrated wireless interfaces,
West says.
A related development will be interfaces that combine both 802.11
wireless LAN and 802.16e mobile WiMAX chips. "These combined chipsets
will be common," he says.
Sprint's subscribers will be using indoor access radios to connect to
the WiMAX net. The intent is to make this connection extremely simple
to use, he says. Initially, a lot of users of the Sprint network will
connect via PCMCIA cards with mobile WiMAX chipsets. Because West
thinks the availability of truly pervasive multimegabit wireless
Internet will be a powerful attraction, part of his time is spent
talking to consumer electronics companies, including Sprint's WiMAX
partners Motorola and Samsung, persuading them to integrate WiMAX into
their devices.
"This isn't about a data net being used by [relatively] few
devices," he says. "We talked to one consumer electronics company
about putting WiMAX in a TV set, and with another about putting it in
printers. Once you do that, you can then deliver other services over
that [WiMAX] network."
For further information about wimax visit
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Sprint touts 4G wireless 
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