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

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (22337)	7/5/2007 3:41:32 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

I have been familiar with picoChip and some other companies who have been developers of femptocell chips and devices. Femtocells can be described at similar to WiFi access points: they are 'dumb terminals' that fit into the fabric of the managed network and can be user deployed, usually without paying extra charges to the licensed service provider. Femptocells can be used for in-building coverage extension and to increase localized bandwidth. In the local environment they can operate much like a WiFi LAN. But for the next 2-3 years they will primarily be used to extend range and provide final connection to the majority of users via WiFi. PicoChip has contracts for a few million WiMAX femptocells. The femptocell is just the starting point: the large demand is driven by the need to penetrate and enhance coverage and bandwidth inside of structures or in local campus settings. But these do not yet have the ability to work as remote base stations or be organized into smart networks. New chips and devices are being developed which have multiple processors needed to do higher order MIMO-AAS plus network routing, hand-offs and other functions. These need to have several times more processing capability than typical access points... but Moore's Law is making that very feasible at low cost. Everything is volume dependent which requires some evolution of product markets. However, large deployments are already on their way to drive the volume curve into the millions of units - a major hurdle are the first few million units. Most firms, including picoChip, Sequans, Beceen, Wavesat, DesignArt and Comsys are fabless design houses: their fixed costs are primarily in R&D and marketing, not fixed costs of to manufacture chips. The 'smart distributed wireless broadband (WiMAX or LTE) network' will evolve over the next several years to include several scales of base stations and 'virtual base station' and router architectures. These will include groups of pico, micro, mini base stations and combinations with localized content/media storage servers that operate in various ways to increase overall network throughput by increasing signal strengths, using higher order modulation and making more use of localized content and connections for PtP. This also helps back haul requirements enormously. The result will be orders of magnitude higher system performance or, from a cost perspective, lower costs of deployment, Wireless is a technology that frees up the network. To deliver 4G wireless will take advantage of this synergistic relationship. I talked about this several years ago, called it 'the middle tier' of wireless: all the stuff between the typical hub and spoke 'cellular' network and the subscriber unit that I think more than ever will grow to be several times the conventional topology. That is the primary reason for the shift to OFDM based technologies from CDMA that will be increasingly apparent in coming years. Right now enough is happening that I can be pretty smug about the outcome... in other words, I look much less like some idiot who is talking about stuff that might not ever happen! I've said a few years ago "Cisco will get into WiMAX" regardless of what they do in WiFi. Now that there is talk about LTE, which is going to be very similar to WiMAX, I would add that to the picture. Cisco will find opportunity in these and will either develop or acquire their way into the market as WiMAX rolls out. I have my doubts about how soon LTE will appear because of the cannibalism of legacy revenues the shift to Ethernet wireless will unleash. There is good reason to resist change to AIP, all IP, wireless technology.