Tim Sanders on Motorola's WiMAX Strategy
>> Motorola Explains WiMAX Strategy
Q&A with Paul Sergeant, Motorola Senior Manager - Alternative Access Networks
Tim Sanders
WiMax.com
August 15th, 2005
tinyurl.com
1. Please tell us what Motorola's planned timeline is for rolling out WiMAX products including what frequencies and types of products?
Motorola expects to ship "light infrastructure" solutions for fixed 3.5 GHz WiMAX networks, based on pre-standard 802.16 revision E, in the Spring of 2006. These will be over the air software upgradeable to full revision E once the standards are complete and the compliant code is fully developed.
Motorola expects to ship fully revision E compliant mobile solutions for trials at 2.5 GHz in the second half of 2006, with commercial availability intended for 2007. This will include IP core products, access solutions, as well as portable and mobile devices.
Motorola intends to support 3.5GHz and 2.5 GHz frequencies, and will evaluate others on a case by case basis as demand matures (e.g., 2.3 GHz, 700 MHz, 3.3 GHz).
2. Does Motorola intend to submit 802.16-2004 class products to Cetecom for testing? If not, why not?
Motorola does not intend to make 802.16-2004 (revision D) products available, as rev D products will not be compatible with revision E, and will experience significant issues in upgrading (for example, from rev D's 512 FFT OFDM to rev E's 1024 and 2048 FFT S-OFDMA physical layers). Motorola believes that Revision D is not an appropriate long-term solution for the mass wireless broadband market.
3. If 802.16e Mobile WiMAX is Motorola's vision for the future of WiMAX where does that leave the company's existing broadband fixed wireless customers?
Motorola's existing Canopy installed base already has the best system for unlicensed spectrum due to its high standard of interference rejection and GPS synchronized delivery. Motorola will continue to market and support the Canopy product line for unlicensed spectrum.
4. Motorola seems to believe its legacy upgrade path to existing Canopy products is clear, but can you articulate for us exactly how that will work and when?
Motorola introduced its Canopy Advantage platform in March 2005. That product provides 14 Mbps sustained throughput and allows operators to offer premium services that require robust quality of service such as gaming and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP).
Motorola's fundamental philosophy is "no subscriber left behind." This means that the customer premises equipment will be supported as the network technology evolves to OFDM, WiMAX and beyond. This does mean that the network equipment will need to be upgraded to support existing customer premises equipment as well as those bases on new technologies.
5. The public perception appears to be that Motorola's existing technology is actually very different from WiMAX standards proposed---is this accurate and if not, why not?
Motorola's existing Canopy Broadband Wireless Access solution provides exactly the same types of services WiMAX will provide. The only difference is that the air interface and QoS options are optimized for non-licensed spectrum.
We will build our 802.16e products to the standard - and beyond. Motorola has been a pioneer in OFDM since the 1990's, and was a member of the original IEEE 802.16 committee. We believe that with revision E, 802.16 has evolved to the point of being the start of a commercially attractive solution, but 802.16 only defines the access air interface and then only the physical (PHY) and Media Access Control (MAC) layers. Much additional work is needed for full inter-operability between WiMAX networks, between WiMAX and cellular (3GPP and 3GPP2) networks, as well as other 802.xx networks such as WiFi. This requires a multi-disciplinary approach with a full range of solutions for core, access and devices. This is the additional work that we will put into our product portfolio.
6. What aspects of Motorola's technology lends itself to adapting to WiMAX standardization? Does the software defined aspects of Motorola's technology make this transition easier than for other carriers?
Motorola believes that WiMAX 802.16 - by itself -- won't be fully interoperable with other networks. By applying our understanding of mobility networks, with technologies such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Seamless Mobility, we believe that WiMAX has the potential to become the first of a next generation of all-packet, end-to-end IP, mobility enabled broadband networks.
7. Does Motorola anticipate that its existing Fixed Broadband Wireless products will carry a lower price point compared to its first WiMAX products and if so, how long is that anticipated to last?
We can't speculate on future prices of our WiMAX products. Canopy is in its fourth year of shipment, and provides a solution that many operators find attractively priced to make their business case.
8. Motorola has been very aggressive with pricing its existing BWA products, so much so that those products may be close to the $100 CPE sweet spot that everyone cites as critical for mass market adoption by the time it launches WiMAX certifiable products---So how and why can WiMAX be a standards path that makes sense for Motorola?
We are looking to WiMAX revision E to extend our BWA product line beyond the unlicensed bands, to support mobility, and with the application of other technologies that Motorola already owns or is developing, to become the first of a next generation of all-packet, end-to-end IP, mobility enabled broadband networks. This is what Motorola means with the Moto Wi4 branding.
9. Does the value of WiMAX spread far beyond Motorola's Canopy system to other divisions within the company including cellular and two-way radio and handset design/manufacture? If so, how does this major shift in technology initiative perceived to benefit Motorola and its customers?
Moto Wi4 solutions will be available to Motorola's carrier networking customers, Government and Enterprise customers, and broadband solutions providers. Our customers stand to benefit from WiMAX's low cost of acquisition, low cost of operation, and through the application of standards and competition to lower these costs yet further.
10. Does Motorola believe that the 802.16e Mobile WiMAX standard will totally supplant the 802.16-2004 fixed wireless standard? If so is that technology robust enough to deliver the bandwidth levels that fixed wireless can (will it encompass a fixed iteration) and what about legacy fixed wireless customers?
A small number of fixed operators whose service is simple Wireless ISP or simple VoIP will never need mobility or the value added carrier-class services that Motorola intends to offer. For them, there will be no real driver to move to revision E - but we believe this to be a very small market compared to the future mobile broadband carrier market. Motorola's simulations show that even for a purely fixed deployment, revision E will outperform revision D in every way - except time to market. We believe that no single standard will dominate the unlicensed bands. Wireless ISPs will continue to deploy whatever technologies are available that make their business case work, which may include WiMAX, WiFi, proprietary, or a combination thereof.
11. Is Motorola seeing its cellular carrier customers desiring to protect their valuable voice services by offloading some data load from voice spectrum?
The cost to deliver a data service over WiMAX is less than 5% the cost of the same service over GPRS - and approaches today's wired broadband cost points. WiMAX offers the potential for new services that 3G can't deliver (such as video downloads), due to performance as well as cost. Therefore it is expected that mobile cellular operators will deploy WiMAX as an overlay of 2G and 2.5G systems, or as an underlay of 3G systems.
12. Where does Motorola see Mobile WiMAX driving the broadband wireless industry particularly on the cellular carrier side?
Moto Wi4 is "WiMAX and beyond" - a product portfolio of fixed and mobile wireless broadband solutions that will take operators to the 4th generation of mobile wireless networks. This includes all-packet; end to end IP networks and rich multimedia services, freed from the demands of legacy circuit domains and the extra cost and limited performance that go with circuits. With Moto Wi4, service providers will be able to offer multiple services, such as business data connectivity, residential broadband, telephony, wholesale data backhaul, and portable/mobile services using the same network investment.
About the Interviewee: Paul Sergeant of Motorola Networks has been in the telecom equipment industry for more than 20 years, with the last 10 in wireless. At Motorola, and he is responsible for marketing Moto Wi4 broadband wireless access solutions based on WiMAX and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), and he previously worked on the introduction of the IP Multimedia System (IMS). Sergeant joined Motorola from Airvana where he was vice president, Product Management and Marketing. Prior to that Sergeant was with Nortel Networks where he led the market introduction of CDMA, and later, UMTS. Sergeant was born and educated in the United Kingdom, and holds a bachelor's of science with honors from the City University in London, England. <<
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