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To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (1890)	8/13/1998 10:53:00 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

N-West Urges Broadband Wireless Standards ( 8/13/98; 12:00 PM EST) By Loring Wirbel, EE Times The National Wireless Electronic Systems Testbed (N-West) will work with a new Industry Standards and Technology Council inside the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to speed the development of standard interfaces for broadband wireless networks. N-West also plans to hold informal meetings with the IEEE 802 networking plenary body at its fall meeting in Albuquerque, N.M., to make sure standards for systems such as Local Multipoint Distribution Service (LMDS) do not fall into the slow path of approval that confronted 802.11 wireless LANs. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is playing an active role in pulling N-West together, and is hosting the headquarters of the testbed at its offices in Boulder, Colo. Roger Marks, N-West chairman, said some government impetus was necessary after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) backed away from playing a standards-setting role with LMDS. "Ever since the FCC focused on the deregulation of broadband in 1994 and turned from standards enforcement to spectrum auctions, there was a big bang in broadband spectrum interest, and no central industry focus on common interfaces," Marks said. "Right now, the goal of NIST and the National Telecommunication and Information Administration is not to run the show, but to facilitate getting the standards effort going." N-West had its first strategy meeting in late July, followed by a general meeting on Sunday, Aug. 9. Twenty-eight companies participated in the meeting, ranging from radio-frequency (RF) component companies and original equipment manufacturers to carrier spectrum winners of the March LMDS auctions. The group will work on common standards for LMDS, the Canadian LMCS, future 38-GHz multipoint radio, and other emerging broadband networks. The group voted to keep space-based and stratospheric wireless broadband interests on hold for now, though Marks said he predicted both N-West and any future industry standards forum would want to pull in as many high-frequency networks as possible, under a common RF interface umbrella. While there are some squabbles within N-West about how generic an RF-to-baseband interface should be, members are universally praising NIST officials for pushing standards efforts through the testbed. J. Leland Langston, member of the technical staff at Raytheon TI Systems, in Plano, Texas, said LMDS proponents need to look at a model like the ATM Forum to drive down the cost of components and subsystems for customer-premises equipment. Raytheon has seen the practical effect of producing for proprietary systems, since it acquired the defense groups of Texas Instruments along with the microwave monolithic integrated circuit business under which Raytheon supplies L.M. Bosch with LMDS components. Raytheon is also a supplier to Angel Technologies, manufacturer of a stratosphere-based high-altitude broadband system, and could help lower costs if common subsystems were produced for systems at multiple frequencies. --------------------------------------- While there are some squabbles within N-West about how generic an RF-to-baseband interface should be, members are universally praising NIST officials for pushing standards efforts through the testbed. --------------------------------------- Langston said Raytheon is forming a commercial-systems group to develop broadband wireless systems, but a common hardware interface standard is necessary to make LMDS costs reasonable. "Davic is another model we could use, since the council did not specify a single standard, but a series of recommendations," Langston said. "LMDS, satellite, and stratospheric wireless broadband all have a chance to take on cable HFC [hybrid fiber/coax] and ADSL [asymmetrical digital subscriber line] infrastructures, but you need to assume a terminal cost of under $1,000 to make this work." The key to taking costs down to that level will be an open interface between a indoor and outdoor RF interface, probably using the L band, said Jack Van der Star, chief technical officer at Belstar Systems, in Oyama, British Columbia. Some large telecommunications OEMs are resisting this effort because they could no longer sell closed systems, but Van der Star said he predicted models from other communication markets would virtually mandate the LMDS industry moving to such standards. Another issue N-West and a future standards consortium must deal with is the channelization of services, which lets LMDS carriers offer bandwidth to customers in regular increments. Van der Star is pushing for more granularity in the channelization of the customer return path, because his company sees videoconferencing as a driver for LMDS. Systems could be based on 64-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) coding in first-generation LMDS, and move to higher QAM constellations in the future. N-West members are pushing for a broadband wireless interface, which will one day be the equivalent of an RJ-11 jack or RS-232 port. Langston said the latter analogy is especially appropriate, since different physical pinouts of RS-232 still can meet a common spec. Developers realize the race is on for a fast standards-approval process, and the trick now is to move from informal consortium to collaboration with the IEEE. c 1998 CMP Media, Inc.