John,
As potential future owners of HLIT, and since BS seemed so excited yesterday (Lunch Meeting)I thought this article worth sharing with cube thread.
multichannel.com
Broadband Week for November 1, 1999
Cisco, Broadcom Wireless Gear Boost MCI, Sprint MMDS Plans
By FRED DAWSON November 1, 1999
A cluster of vendors led by Cisco Systems Inc. and Broadcom Corp. took the wraps off a wireless technology last week that they hope will put MCI WorldCom Inc. and Sprint Communications Co. on course to challenge cable in the broadband-services arena.
If the new wireless-broadband system -- targeted for multichannel-multipoint-distribution-service spectrum and other microwave tiers -- works as planned, it will allow MCI, Sprint and other players in fixed-wireless services to deliver a full slate of video, voice and high-speed data to homes and small businesses without stinting on coverage or service variety.
"The most encouraging part of this development is that it really validates our choice of wireless as a medium for delivering broadband services to the mass market," Sprint spokesman Russ Robinson said.
Underlying the new wireless-broadband platform is a technology known as "vector orthoganal frequency-division multiplexing," developed over the past four years by Clarity Wireless Inc., which Cisco acquired one year ago.
Cisco is making the technology available free-of-charge to Broadcom and other chip-makers in an effort to establish it as a de facto industry standard that maximizes the broadband-service potential of microwave-based delivery systems, director of marketing for broadband fixed wireless Steve Smith said.
"Our game is to get fixed wireless moving as a viable competitor to cable and DSL [digital subscriber line]," Smith said. "We've chosen this technology as the one to back because it delivers both a higher spectral efficiency and a higher link efficiency than anything we've seen."
Broadcom -- which is supplying chips for the current wireless-broadband market, founded in QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) and QPSK (quadrature phase shift key) technologies -- is swinging behind VOFDM for the same reason, vice president of marketing Tim Lindenfelser said. "This technology overcomes the severe line-of-sight and other limitations of other approaches to MMDS," he added.
While MCI and Sprint plan to launch next-generation wireless-broadband systems as soon as the first quarter of 2000, Broadcom will be in a position to supply VOFDM chips to systems and customer-premises-equipment makers early enough next year to meet deployment schedules for most carriers' wireless-broadband deployments, Lindenfelser said.
Robinson said that while the new system offered "exciting" possibilities, Sprint has issued a request for proposals for initial market build-outs, and it would be unfair to vendors responding to that RFP to give an unqualified thumbs-up to a new system that has yet to be fully tested.
"We've looked at [VOFDM], and we are looking forward to what these guys come up with," he added.
Together, MCI and Sprint have secured control of MMDS in 120 markets representing 60 percent of U.S. households, with 80 markets now falling under Sprint's umbrella, Robinson said. By the end of the second quarter, Sprint plans to have 10 cities operational on the new wireless-broadband platform, which starts with high-speed two-way data and one-way cable and later adds voice services, he added.
"We'll be operational in 30 markets by the end of 2000," he said. The first 10 include Phoenix, San Francisco and Detroit -- where companies acquired by Sprint were already operating -- as well as seven other markets to be named later.
The new "BCM2200" ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) -- which combines VOFDM technology and media-access control in a single chip -- will be priced low enough to allow manufacturers to deliver customer equipment at costs nearly on par with cable gear, Lindenfelser said.
"The main difference [in cost] is the antenna, although there's some trade-off there with the cost of the tuner that's required in cable," he noted.
Lindenfelser declined to set a delivery date for commercial product, but he said samples of the new ASIC would be available to manufacturers in the first half of 2000.
One reason why Broadcom can proceed so fast and so cheaply is because it is tapping the same MAC technology used in DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) chips, officials said. They also noted that the VOFDM technology has gone through several development phases over the past four years, giving the partners confidence that any further design refinements before volume production would be relatively minor.
VOFDM involves two basic techniques that backers said will allow network operators to achieve high levels of market coverage with enough bandwidth per user to support everything from voice to high-definition TV. This is a tall order, given the fact that operators only have approximately 200 megahertz of spectrum to work with.
The vector part of the nomenclature refers to the fact that the system uses spatial diversity. That means it uses a dual-feed antenna receiver at the end-user premises to capture signals coming in from separate paths and combines them to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio at any given frequency.
This helps to strengthen the signals bouncing off reflective surfaces, reaching users that are not in direct line of sight of the transmitter, Lindenfelser noted.
Spectral efficiency -- which maximizes the number of bits per hertz, or cycle of frequency -- is achieved through the orthoganal frequency-division multiplexing aspect of the technology, where the number of bits inserted into thin slices of frequency, or "frequency bins," depends on the noise-tolerance level within each frequency segment.
"We pack a lot of carriers into the spectrum and weight them based on signal-to-noise [ratio], which gets away from the modulation-capacity limitations you encounter when you use a single carrier over a 6-MHz channel," Smith said.
The result is a system that delivers 20 megabits per second in a 6-MHz channel to all users, wherever they happen to be, Broadcom product-line manager Pete LaRocca said.
Moreover, the chip, operating at baseband, can apply the modulation technique to a signal that's destined to go out at virtually any frequency, whether it's at the 1.9-gigahertz level of PCS (personal-communications services) or at the 28-GHz level of LMDS (local multipoint distribution service).
But it's MMDS -- and specifically the high-volume demand anticipated from a combined MCI and Sprint -- that comprises the immediate targets for the development activities of the new alliance.
"We think this technology is what Sprint and WorldCom need to be successful as providers of broadband services over fixed-wireless local-access networks," Smith said.
Other players signing on with the initiative include Motorola Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., Samsung Telecommunications America Inc., Toshiba America Consumer Products, Pace Micro Technology plc, Bechtel Telecommunications, LCC International, Electronic Data Systems Corp. and KPMG International.
So far, the only player involved that will be supplying headend equipment is Cisco, but Smith said it appeared that other systems suppliers would soon join, since Broadcom and TI will be making their chips available to Cisco's competitors.
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