The WiBro Affair

A negative word about WiBro from SK Telecom's CEO ignited a PR frenzy in favor of Korea's "Mobile WIMAX" technology.

Recently endorsed as ITU-R IMT-2000, this member of the 802.16 family is alive and kicking in Seoul. While SKT focuses on HSPA and rolls out WiBro reluctantly, KT insists with the benediction of Korea Inc : the Government, the ETRI, and of course Posco, the mother company of POSDATA, a major promoter of WiBro who's seeking new markets and opening offices in Kuala Lumpur

KT claims 100,000 subs EOY 2007 with the ambition to reach 400,000 EOY 2008, and downloads to be 3 times faster than with HSPA (3 Mbps vs 1). It's WiBro service sounds almost cheap : a little bit under 20,000 wons, that's halfway between ADSL and FTTH.

But Korea Telecom will need to widen the range of devices available - up to now : 10 modems, 5 laptops and 3 handsets (PC Cards and PDAs are also on the market).

And KT needs to spend a lot on IPTV this year.

To add to the fun, competition is definitely getting fiercer in Korea : POSDATA is facing technology thieves within its own staff and 4 researcher have just been put in jail because they tried to steal WiBro secrets for the US.

Now that's a brilliant PR operation : you don't want to steal something you can't sell... Unless you're an art lover falling for rare antiques.

Aloha's long goodbye, Standards Wars Episode 4G and the phantom menace

Here's AT&T's farewell gift for Aloha Partner, a phantom company full of spectrum, meant from the start* as an empty shell for sale : $2.5bn.

Here's the ITU's gift for WiMAX promoters : OFDMA / 802.16 joins FDMA, TDMA and CDMA in the IMT-2000 3G family just on time for the IMT-advanced kick-off. The 3GSM crew already knew this promising rival would be casted for Standards Wars Episode 4G, but this means intel & Co are here to stay beyond a phantom menace.

Here's 3's gift for Qualcomm : the Skypephone uses the Brew platform. San Diego joins Cupertino in the hype zone. Up North, Redmond is just starting to scratch the surface - a third Halo and a phantomatic 1.6% of Facebook**.


* see "Hiwire - Aloha Partners, Goodbye Stranger" (20060502)
** see "Microsoft outpervasived by Facebook and RIM" (20071025)

3G & 4G - WiMAX flirts with ITU

Following the WiMAX Forum's whitepaper on "WiMAX and IMT-2000" (20070122), the ITU could consider mobile WiMAX as an official 3G technology. Along with W-CDMA and CDMA2000, but also EDGE or DECT.

And this time it could work, since major cellcos may not want to counterlobby the IEEE on that one. Arun Sarin recently warned fellow MNOs about the risk of letting WiMAX kill 3G but Vodafone may want to trade its nod with a permanent lock on its GSM spectrum. And cellcos don't want another battle for 4G licensing (beyond the colossal sums paid to governments, they have to cope with license fees from Qualcomm & Co, not to mention the complexity of technos overloaded with unnecessary specs). Even in the 3GSM world, WiMAX could be welcomed as a convenient cornerstone for 4G LTE (better have them with us than against us).

But the IT-telecom war ain't over till it's over, and I'm not sure European manufacturers will tolerate the gift to Cisco & Co that soon. In France, Orange, SFR and Bouygues won't let Iliad end up with 3G for Free that easily.

Unless you consider IT gave up the war and decided to join the telecom band. Not unlike Qualcomm's GSM1x, the large IEEE 802.16 family's latest avatars are advertised as the natural evolution of their main competitors (TDD inside, MBS combining DVB-H and 3GPP E-UTRA...). Even WiBro, that prodigal son, is welcomed back home. How cute... Charles Ingalls will have to cut a lot of wood for the party tonight.

IEEE 802.16m* evolution looks great, but so did 802.16n, with n the variable for the number of years before actual delivery. And this is not your own OFDMA out there, but "IP-OFDMA". Indeed, from WiFi to WiMAX and 3G, "Pervasive Computing" would completely claim the W-LAN - W-MAN - W-WAN spectrum, and fulfill its dream of stealing both seamlessness and security from the 3GSM DNA, locking a firmer than ever grip on the femtocell level, where a massive herd of wild devices roam not always peacefully.

Convergence ahead, at last ? Universal Mobile Telecommunication System ahead, at last ? Negociation ahead, for sure.


* "1Giga 4G" or rather 100 Mbps for mobile apps and 1 Gbps for fixed apps.

Crash Test Thumbies

The ITU released "digital.life", the 8th part of its "ITU Internet Reports" started in 1997.
In this episode, the young wizzard Harry Wireless Potter experiences new powers with his thumbs. Even the nerdest readers may learn some useful tricks like the origins of the word "avatar" : "I'm not wasting my time in silly games, Mom - I'm paving the way for the descent of God". Dubya may object this rather Darwinian approach doesn't leave much room to the Intelligent Design theory according to which the rise of the Thumb Generation was programmed from the start by the God of Operators.
Like all reports, this one was obsolete even before being released, but as an history book it has some virtues and I found it quite refreshing. It was like reading a old series of articles published ten years ago (remember the digital world of tomorrow, the sociological and psychological impacts, the new id and all those paradigm shifts ?) but with the actual figures instead of wild projections.
Now 2 billion mobile subs could have sounded wild ten years ago.