Caroline Gabriel on Motorola (and Intel & Nokia)
>> Motorola Grabs for Mobile WiMAX Driving Seat
Caroline Gabriel
Research Director
Rethink Research Associates
WiMAX Trends
wimaxtrends.com
Motorola, already one of the most aggressive vendors in driving the shift to mobile WiMAX, has stepped up its efforts still further with additional resources allocated to the project and the announcement of the Moto Wi4 product line.
Its actions show the importance of WiMAX to the company’s increasingly coherent strategy based around integrating multiple mobile technologies, and that Motorola seeks to gain dominance of the WiMAX agenda as it has not in 3G. This will accelerate moves towards making 802.16e a reality and – even more importantly – commercially affordable. Motorola has already demonstrated, with the aggressive pricing of its Canopy range – which will be migrated to WiMAX once the mobile standard is ratified – its ability to use its scale to drive down prices in the market and shift the whole sector closer to the important goal of a low cost, even a zero-subsidy, customer device.
This will be good news, then, for the mobile WiMAX effort as a whole, which needs to make rapid progress in order to fend off challenges from other broadband wireless technologies that could also appeal to carriers, such as Flash-OFDM or upcoming Qualcomm developments. However, it will also be threatening to some individual players whose roadmaps are less advanced or less well funded, and Intel itself could even fall into that category.
The mobile WiMAX agenda is entirely geared to the carriers. Unlike 802.16-2005, which has an important unlicensed spectrum element and so can be seen as supporting an extension of the Wi-Fi WISP model in many markets, 802.16e will only be practical in licensed bands (unless 700MHz is opened up without license in significant regions of the world). This is both an opportunity and a danger for Intel – the chip giant and WiMAX’ chief agent provocateur gains the chance to influence and gain revenue from a major market it has previously left alone, the carriers. But the risk is that it is straying into a sector where it has little experience or track record, and where there are many powerful forces vying to hijack the all-IP mobile trends that Intel regards as its future.
One of those forces will be Motorola, well established in the carrier market and with a strategy more in tune with the large telcos’ multi-network ambitions than Intel’s more WISP-oriented roots. Intel is signing powerful partners of course, notably Nokia in a handset venture that will also accelerate the progress of 802.16e significantly. This will present another reason for Motorola to move quickly and the diverge from Intel. Most of the current talk is about infrastructure, but Motorola will certainly be looking to WiMAX and multi-radio devices to boost its handset business in future too, and help CEO Ed Zander in his quest to leapfrog Nokia.
The new WiMAX initiative involves increased R&D, resources, and technology relationships, said the company, although these were not quantified.
“Motorola has aligned our Networks business to support a company-wide initiative to develop WiMAX and other mobile broadband wireless solutions that provide an effective means for carriers to give their customers broadband services when and where they want them at an affordable cost,” said Dan Coombes, general manager of Wireless Broadband Networks, and chief technology officer for Motorola Networks. “Motorola is well on the way to delivering WiMAX solutions.”
Motorola will draw not only on its existing proprietary broadband wireless range, Canopy, which is being extended to support the upcoming 802.16e standard, but also on other key technologies within its group, such as its OFDM developments; and activities in IP internetworking; all-IP flat Carrier Access Point (CAP) architecture; and IP-enabled handsets. This demonstrates the real strength of companies like Motorola and Alcatel as they move into WiMAX – the ability to draw on a wide pool of R&D, customer contacts and expertise across their various divisions to strengthen a new product.
The Moto Wi4 portfolio initially includes a ‘light infrastructure’ solution for rural areas and developing countries that offers very low cost of deployment and ownership, and a carrier class platform. The latter incorporates the CAP architecture, which uses all-IP access technology to put intelligence into the base station itself, eliminating several hardware elements from the radio access network and reducing operational costs. Sprint is the heaviest advocate of this approach, and also one of Motorola’s key R&D partners (Nokia has a similar architecture called i-HSPA).
The strategy of targeting rural and developing economies until full mobility arrives to support urban consumers is a common one, but was highlighted this week when Motorola won its largest ever deal for its proprietary Canopy gear, with the Philippines' Smart Communications. <<
- Eric - |
