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Motorola: The College Boy
By Kevin Fitchard
Sep 27, 2006 2:13 PM
If any vendor can claim to have momentum on Mobile WiMAX, it’s Motorola. Not only did it come away with a major piece of Sprint’s multibillion-dollar deployment, it’s guaranteed itself a sizable slot of the wireless ISP business with its investment in Clearwire. For good measure it’s even landed a few smaller WiMAX contracts worldwide, including one for a national broadband network in Pakistan.
That’s momentum any of its competitors would envy, no matter how big or small. But with that success comes an awful lot of responsibility. Though Sprint’s embrace of WiMAX is certainly a turning point for the technology, there’s still a profound undercurrent of skepticism in the industry that Sprint’s ‘4G’ plans are an early climax—that the peculiar characteristics of Sprint’s 2.5 GHz spectrum, restrictions placed on the licenses by the Federal Communications Commission and its own technology maverick tendencies make Sprint the exception, not the rule. There is yet no evidence that other major carriers will deploy the technology. In fact, there are no proven business cases or even any commercial networks for those carriers to base a decision on. If WiMAX is truly a technology of the large scale—one that spans more than regional and competitive operators—than it’s up to Motorola and fellow contract winner Samsung to prove it through Sprint. For its part, Motorola thinks it has a strong case to make.
“Sprint has recognized that people want affordable broadband,” Motorola chief technology officer Dan Coombes said. “The cellular carriers have tried for years to offer broadband to the average consumer, but only a few people use those PCMCIA card services. They’re looking for an alternative.”
Though it came late to the WiMAX game, Motorola has built an impressive WiMAX portfolio over the last few years. Unlike other carriers, it shunned WiMAX’s fixed iteration and focused on the IEEE 802.16e standard, using its proprietary Canopy line of broadband wireless gear to fill fixed WiMAX’s hole in its product catalog. In a short time, its developed a two-tiered product line with Adaptive Antenna System base stations for the initial deployment of portable or fixed WiMAX service and a smart antenna Multiple Input/Multiple Output (MIMO) system that will support full mobility.
The same could be said for all WiMAX vendors, though. In fact, the standardization of 802.16e and the certification schedule of the WiMAX forum have put almost all WiMAX vendors on the same product development path.
Motorola’s engineers have a few tricks in their pocket protectors that give its WiMAX line technological and economic advantages, Coombes said. Motorola has developed what it claims is its own unique “zero-footprint” architecture, which it carried over from its Canopy technology, he said. By locating the RF components in the antenna array, the critical radio base station components are literally up in the air, requiring only a fiber-optic feed to the network controller, which—since the signal degradation concerns are eliminated—could be located anywhere, Coombes said.
Technology aside though, Motorola’s biggest advantage is the scope of its platform. It is one of the few carriers that can fill in every variable of the WiMAX equation from core router to handset. It even has a IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) offering for operators looking to converge WiMAX with their existing networks, be they wireline or cellular. Of all of the elements Motorola brings to the table, however, its handset business is the most important, and the main reason why Sprint named Motorola and Samsung as its initial vendors, said Peter Jarich, broadband wireless analyst for Current Analysis.
As the No. 2 and No. 3 handset makers, Samsung and Motorola can move WiMAX device development cycles forward in ways a Nortel Networks or an Alcatel can’t. Compelling handsets supporting compelling applications will make or break WiMAX, determining whether it becomes a robust services-driven or just another dumb-pipe broadband access kit. In turn, Motorola and Samsung have every reason to ramp up handset development beyond most basic one of supporting their own network deployments with Sprint, Jarich said.
“If this is just a PC card market, one of the main advantages Motorola and Samsung has simply goes away,” said Jarich said.
Motorola not only stands to make a lot of money selling WiMAX phones and multimedia devices, it can use its handset businesses as leverage for new WiMAX contracts, especially if it continues to target wireless carriers such as Sprint. Sprint, like most of its ilk, tends to deploy networks regionally, handing entire markets over to individual vendors, core, base stations and all. Sprint is doing no different with WiMAX.
Coombes said Sprint would hand Motorola a regional portion of the WiMAX rollout, while Samsung will be handed another with the possibility of a third vendor completing the circle. It’s possible, even in today’s cellular networks, to interconnect different vendors switches and base station controllers—the interfaces are all open. Carriers choose not to for the sake of simplicity and economics, Coombes said. The interfaces may be open but the boxes themselves are proprietary. A carrier doesn’t want to train technicians to work on multiple manufacturers’ systems. If that trend continues, Motorola can easily leverage handset prominence into radio access network contracts, which would then drive core contracts, he said.
“WiMAX is a new technology and operators don’t have a lot of experience with it—they don’t want a lot of people coming in with different elements,” Coombes said. “We provide the total end-to-end solution, tying it together all the way down to the CPE. … They know we have the experience to make it work. They know we have the resources to make it work.”
The danger for Motorola, however, could come from own success. The more successfully it spurs on the handset industry, generating devices from multiple vendors, the less the need for a vendor with an end-to-end handset-to-core solution. At that point, the warts on Motorola’s other divisions might come into sharp focus. Motorola has nowhere near the scale in networks as it has in handsets, and apart from its video and access portfolios, has little wireline presence to speak of. As all telecom networks evolve toward IP and IMS gains prominence, Jarich said, carriers will likely start looking to vendors with much more experience in the core and overall network architectures. Companies with more experience with IMS like Nortel Networks and Nokia-Siemens, or companies with the scale and scope to span wireline and wireless such as a combined Alcatel-Lucent may seem more attractive. Those core contracts, by the same logic in reverse, could leverage themselves into radio access contracts, presenting Motorola with a considerable competitive challenge, Jarich said.
But those competitive challenges are far off in the future, if they emerge at all. A WiMAX industry has to evolve before a competitive market to emerge. Today, it’s highly unlikely that another carrier the size of Sprint will make a decision to pursue WiMAX—not until there are more proof points that the technology can do what it claims and the service can make money. So for the time being Motorola must only share the stage with Samsung. It’s Motorola’s big break and an opportunity to show that it is an indispensable player in the WiMAX space.
Motorola isn’t just performing for it’s own and Sprint’s benefit though. It has to prove to the world that WiMAX works, an enormous responsibility. Every carrier in the world that has ever contemplated a wireless broadband service will be watching very closely the work it does with Sprint and Clearwire. Even though there are a dozen WiMAX vendors out there who would have loved to cut Motorola off to get their hands on the Sprint contract, they’re all secretly rooting for Motorola now. If WiMAX doesn’t work for Sprint, it doesn’t spell doom for the WiMAX industry. There would still be significant opportunities for the technology with regional players and broadband ISPs, but if WiMAX isn’t a big-carrier play, it certainly can’t justify a big-vendor business.
“Motorola is kind of like the first person in the family to go to college,” Jarich said. “From the WiMAX community’s perspective there’s a lot resting on these guys: ‘You’ve made it to the big league. Now don’t let us down, and certainly don’t embarrass us.’” |
