Australian WiMAX pioneer trashes the technology as “a miserable failure”
Hard to believe, but CEO Bay stated this in his speech at the international WiMAX conference!!!!
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20/03/2008 09:37:00 - by Martyn Warwick & Commsday
One of the world’s first WiMAX operators, Hervey Bay, of Australia’s Buzz Broadband, has closed the network, with the CEO labeling the technology as a “disaster” that has “failed miserably.”
In an astonishing outburst before the audience at an international WiMAX conference audience in Bangkok, Thailand, CEO Garth Freeman slammed the technology, saying its non-line of sight performance was “non-existent” beyond two kilometres from the base station, that indoor performance decayed at a mere 400 metres and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds.
Mr. Freeman said poor latency and jitter made the technology unsuitable and unacceptable for many Internet applications in general and for VoIP in particular. Buzz used to extol the virtues of VoIP, hyping it as a main selling point as it sought to persuade people to sign-up for the new service and dump old ones supplied by the incumbent .
Garth Freeman told delegates, “WiMAX may not work,” adding that the technology remains “mired in opportunistic hype." The CEO also emphasised that most WiMAX deployments are still in the trials stage and that the technology is attractive to and used by used by "start-up carriers" and is only supported by “second-tier vendors”.
He then contrasted WiMAX with HSPA and pointed out that there are already 154 commercial networks in operation and that the technology has the full backing of top tier vendors.
What made Freeman’s tirade all the more extraordinary was that just 12 months ago he fronted the same event and gave an upbeat and overwhelmingly positive appraisal of the platform – a platform that he had deployed just a few months before.
At the time, Garth Freeman said his company had signed 10 per cent of its 55,000 user target market in just two months, a market share that quickly rose to 25 per cent on the back of an advertising campaign that highlighted cheap VoIP prices.
But back then, Mr. Freeman also acknowledge that WiMAX technology has indoor coverage issues. Indeed, at this week's Bangkok meeting, the CEO revealed that his frankness last year had resulted in a sharp reprimand from his supplier, Airspan. The company was unhappy that its equipment had been implicitly criticised.
Elsewhere, other early WiMAX adopters have also reported issues with indoor coverage. Late last year VSNL of India said at an IEEE conference that indoor signal loss occurs just 200 metres from a base station.
Garth Freeman says Buzz has now abandoned WiMAX and will pursue a “horses for courses” policy. This includes use of the TD-CDMA standard at 1.9GHz – used by operators such as New Zealand’s Woosh Wireless – and a platform he describes as wireless DOCSIS. This a relatively little-known technology that takes HFC plant and extends its capabilities via wireless mesh.
Mr. Freeman says wireless DOCSIS operates at up to 38Mbps in the 3.5GHz spectrum and its customer premises equipment supports two voice ports for under $A70 while it boasts “huge cell coverage.” He added that he will also deploy more conventional wireless mesh platforms at 2.4GHz that support up to 10Mbps with CPE voice ports costing less than A$80.
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