Notes On WiMAX World Asia

The big story coming out of WiMAX World Asia in Bangkok last week was the damning verdict the head of one Australian WiMAX operator gave about the technology. The veracity of his claims are under fire from a network gear vendor, but in any case, there was more to the event than this well-publicized rant.

Garth Freeman, the head of Buzz Broadband, created quite a stir when he called WiMAX a "disaster", based on his company's experience with it. He said that it suffers from poor latency, so bad that it can't be used for VoIP, and performance decayed quickly indoors and once a user didn't have line of sight to a base station. Freeman has a valid point in that WiMAX has been incessantly hyped by the industry and the media over the last few years, but plenty of operators worldwide have launched WiMAX networks, many running VoIP over it, and haven't echoed his condemnation. For what it's worth, Airspan, the network equipment maker that supplied Buzz with its WiMAX gear, fired back, saying that the operator sacrificed network performance in favor of lower costs by using microcell base stations, and that it had insufficient backhaul.

Whatever the case may beJohn Tanner at Telecom Asia gives his take on the story and the show, noting that there were several other key trends that emerged from it, but didn't get quite so much attention. He says it's clear that WiMAX will have a lot of success in emerging markets, where it will leapfrog fixed-line technologies, and that voice service will play a big role in operators' success in them. He also echoes the sentiment of my post from last week about WiMAX devices, saying that MIDs and other devices will step up to fill the gap between smartphones and PDAs and laptops.