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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: axial who wrote (21586)	5/24/2007 12:28:29 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Hi Jim, It's only speculation on my part, but I think that perceiving WiMAX as a good "fit" for backhaul is largely an outgrowth on the part of multiple communities of interest tacitly accepting the idea that affordable fiber-based alternatives are not going to happen anytime soon, especially when wireline backhaul fiber resale by incumbents to other wireless providers or to whomever is still among their most lucrative offerings today. Which is to say that, yes, telcos and MSOs "do" provide fiber-based backhual in the form of T1'$ and T3'$ to all comers, and will even support point to point uWave shots between towers, but at monopoly-based tariffs making them virtually unattainable, or attainable only at onerous price points, by competitive carriers and community-based neighborhood networking initiatives. The question of whether WiFi or WiMAX is best suited for fixed or mobile (or both) also comes into play in the larger scheme of things, but for this discussion might be considered moot. Instead the question should be whether either of those 802 technologies, in the face of abundant fiber already deployed, should even be used as backhaul, at all. I'm not sure I'm following your line of thought here: "It seems to me that incumbent-owned mobile operators "second- and third- tier situations" will be few and far between, and I've yet to see any statistical evidence that other RF solutions are clearly superior to using a portion of an adjunct WiMAX network itself for backhaul." My use of "2nd and 3rd tier" may have been misplaced. I was referring to intermediately- (2nd) and distantly- remote (3rd) locales with scarce fiber deployments. As to whether other RF technologies are superior to WiMAX, there clearly are such solutions, but they are also more expensive and require their own towers and radio systems, usually fashioned around North American digital hierarchical (T1, T3, etc) digital formats, which must be up- and down- converted to and from the 802 formats at each hop. And of course, being more complicated, it's also more expensive, hence more lucrative to the powers that be. FAC