For Ron Resnick, India is the biggest battleground in the war to secure the future Wimax technology.
With the US market heading for the co-existence of Wimax and its competitor LTE and Chinese firms lodged behind TD-LTE technologies, India remains Wimax’s only hope for counterbalancing the size of the Chinese market.
DNA caught up with Resnick, the president and chairman of WiMAX Forum, the standards organisation, to find out what he’s doing to convince Indian operators to join his side. Excerpts from the interview:
How important is India to the future of Wimax as a technology?
It’s a focal point. I have been coming here since 2002. We have a better shot of winning in India than we do in China (which officially promotes TD-LTE for strategic reasons). If big players here, like RIL, get onboard with Wimax, I would tend to agree it would be a pivot point where the momentum behind Wimax should really accelerate. If it doesn’t happen, clearly it’s not going to be big. So there is a tremendous advantage of having India onboard Wimax.
There are people who compare Wimax today to CDMA and LTE to GSM. Many people, including some operators, worry that Wimax may not have the industry support like GSM has…
If you go to the Wimax Forum website, you can see who the board members are. Nokia’s on the board of the Wimax Forum. All the big players are on the board. Nokia Siemens bought out Motorola (network business) and I have been told that they are continuing with the (Motorola’s) Wimax business.
What about Ericsson, the world’s largest network equipment maker? It’s busy constructing the LTE standard…
Ericsson is a member of the Forum. Ericsson comes to every activity that we have in Wimax and takes lots of notes. Once I asked them, can I have your notes, you are taking better notes than I am! When I get asked ‘what’s the difference between Wimax and competing technologies’…not much! All the big companies are there. The only exception is Qualcomm.
The way I see it is, in all the big companies, there are two divisions, one building Wimax and another building the competing technologies. At the end of the day, it is not about technology. It is about what spectrum and what technology you can use on that spectrum. It’s also about some of the incumbent companies trying to protect some of the IPR (intellectual property), their capability of selling what they have got. So there is a fair amount of effort from competitors because they would like to see their 3G-HSPA models work as long as they can. So they are trying to do what they can to perpetuate the current model. Finally, it’s also about the competitive environment (in the market).
Are there royalty issues around the two technologies?
Wimax initially started out as IEEE standard, from computing companies. Those companies typically don’t make money on royalty. The difference in royalty rates (between Wimax and current telecom technologies) is substantial. The idea is to keep the royalty rates as low as possible. We are in a better position to do that because in the space of OFDM (the core of Wimax), the patents are spread out, unlike in WCDMA (3G) where the patents are very closely held. In OFDM, no one has a big dominant share (of patents). So from a defensive and offensive position, it is much more balanced.
How ready is Wimax for primetime? Mediatek — the company behind the Indian and Chinese cellphone brands — says you can make a proper GSM-Wimax smartphone for $150?
We have around 280 devices, including 10 handsets. If one of the big companies get onboard, the whole country of Taiwan is Wimax oriented, so you will see an onslaught of handsets at very low prices. A dongle (data card) is $35 (`1,600), it’s over $100 for competing technologies.
Is LTE more efficient than Wimax as some people believe?
Not correct. Both are very similar as far as the current systems are concerned. By the end of the year, Wimax will move into release 2, which will support 225 Mbps downlink, TD-LTE is 40-70 Mbps. If you are talking about LTE-Advanced, it’s comparable, but it’s five years in the future, may be four.
When do you expect the deployment scenario in India to become clear?
Within six months, if nothing happens, I’d be very surprised. But I would expect a lot sooner. I met with all them and they’re genuinely looking at it. They are doing their due diligence.
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