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Backhauling
WiMAX with… WiMAX? Not for Long!
Broadband wireless is just around the
corner. You can smell it… at the coffee shops, where Wi-Fi users are
the precursor to a broader invasion of untethered data consumers. You
can hear all about it from the salespeople at Radio Shack, Circuit City and Best Buy, as they hawk the
latest wireless home networking systems. Certainly, the day must be
coming soon when customers can connect directly to wireless data providers
in far greater numbers. The surge is inevitable. With Wi-Fi
chips in computers, WiMAX standards in development and mobile broadband
wireless capability just around the corner, WiMAX is coming…
NPRG noted in its Fixed Wireless Carriers Report last year that, according to the
Wireless Internet Service Provider Association (WISPA), about 1.5 million
users were served by 3,000 to 5,000 wireless ISPs. That’s a lot of
small carriers, but something much bigger is on the horizon. Sprint
is preparing to utilize its nationwide broadband wireless spectrum; if you
were ever in doubt about that, the recent Sprint-Clearwire partnership
announcement should have cleared up any uncertainty. If you live in
Clearwire cities, you are already becoming familiar with the high-profile
presence of Clearwire trucks, workers and logos. During his WiMAX
Strategies Conference closing keynote at NXTcomm earlier this summer, Scott Richardson, Clearwire’s
Chief Strategy Officer, noted that the company has had greater than 10%
penetration in two-thirds of the markets it has served for at least a
year. Tell me that’s not noticeable!
WiMAX is coming!
But how will immense traffic find its way to the
Internet backbone? If all those data customers begin downloading Daily
Show clips, dancing babies and ESPN videos, not to mention sharing
e-mails and family photos, a lot of bandwidth is being used between the
antenna towers and the consumers’ desktops, laptops and handheld
devices. As a result, backhaul is an active discussion point.
The usability of the network and financial viability of the network rely on
backhaul – and potential fortunes may be won or lost there.
During an International Engineering Consortium
(IEC) session dubbed “WiMAX Mesh and Open Networks: A New Model for Cost-Effective
Network Deployment,” several panelists drew a picture of Wi-Fi and WiMAX
mesh networks, with WiMAX as the backhaul medium. Certainly, WiMAX
can initially handle the load, and it may even be a sufficient long-term
solution to backhaul broadband wireless traffic in remote areas with few
subscribers and for lightly-used, soon-to-be-bankrupt, unsuccessful big
city networks. But if broadband wireless is successful, carriers
won’t want to waste such valuable spectrum for backhaul. Wi-Fi and
WiMAX spectrum will be accessible by broadband wireless service subscribers
via a pre-inserted chip in almost every device they purchase. It will
become a scarce, valuable commodity for providing end-user service.
Therefore, the long-term future of broadband wireless backhaul lies primarily in microwave or millimeter wave
technology, at least where wireline alternatives are not available.
Barry West, President of 4G Networks for Sprint
Nextel seems to understand. During his keynote at the WiMAX
Strategies conference at NXTcomm, he mentioned that Sprint is building a
big microwave backhaul network – where fiber is unavailable, of
course. West also notes that fiber does not reach many cell towers,
so the company’s microwave network will serve most of its sites.
Towerstream seems to get it too, also backhauling its small business
customers’ broadband wireless service via microwave.
So when we hear discussion about the advancement
of WiMAX as a backhaul technology, we chuckle. It may be an
interesting short-term solution. It may be an interesting niche
solution. The long-term solution where fiber is unavailable, however,
is microwave and, of course, the budding millimeter wave technology.
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