-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Farber
Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2004 5:22 PM
To: Ip
Subject: [IP] more on Imax vs. WiFi: WiFi is the inheritor to
Ethernet's Manifest Destiny
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger@xxxxxxx>
Date: November 23, 2004 11:53:26 AM EST
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] Imax vs. WiFi: WiFi is the inheritor to Ethernet's
Manifest Destiny
I have been involved in these realms for the last 4+ years
both in the hardware manufacturer and service provider
realms. Here is my opinionated, but educated perspective on
the WiMax vs Wi-Fi debate:
At this point in time, WiMax/802.16 is another Zero Billion
Dollar industry. There are no WiMax Products today. There
will be some WiMax products within the next 3 - 6 months, but
they will be first generation and far from the promises that
the WiMax forum has been promising. Wi-Fi/802.11 chipsets are
already up the learning curve by several generations. Wi-Fi
chipsets are already shipping in the high 10's of millions / year.
IMHO, 802.11 is recapitulating the evolution of Ethernet into
the Wireless realms.
Ethernet was originally considered a "toy" technology by many
of the industry leaders of the time. The manly technologies
at that time were first Token Ring, then 802.12 AnyLAN VG, then ATM.
Wi-Fi is currently considered useful only for the home and
some enterprise applications and a "toy" for outdoor
Municipal Networks.
But Ethernet out evolved and kept delivering just enough
functionality, at much lower cost than the too sophisticated
QoS laden and expensive "heavyweights".
Wi-Fi/802.11 has taken on the mantle of Ethernet's Manifest
Destiny (it uses almost exactly the same packet frame as
Ethernet) and brings it into the wireless realms. There are
many more companies, universities and hackers pushing the
boundaries of what 802.11 can do and the volume is growing at
an accelerating pace.
Today 802.11 is at a similar phase of evolution as early
Ethernet was when there were only a shared contention medium
via hubs and bridges. Ethernet really took off when switches
became available and allowed the contention realm to be
broken up to support parallel data flows. And that is what we
can expect in the next stage of 802.11 evolution. This is
what is needed to make Mesh wireless networks viable with
802.11. There are already several companies developing mesh
(though only a few are doing it in a way that will scale).
There is also an 802.11s working group developing a standard
for wireless mesh. And mesh is what will allow 802.11 to
eventually cover municipal areas.
WiMax hype is extremely misleading. You hear that a WiMax
basestation can create coverage of 35 - 70 miles, deliver 50
Mbps, will work in Unlicensed, Licensed frequencies can
deliver Non Line Of Sight (NLOS) through trees and buildings,
will support mobility and CPE built into Laptops.
But this hype is misleading because they mush together all
the claims for all the different frequencies from 2 GHz to 10
GHz, licensed and unlicensed, and projections of their
roadmap for the next 8 years.
If you compare WiMax using the same 5.8Ghz Unlicensed
frequencies that 802.11a would use, there may be only 3 or 4
db link budget advantage of WiMax over 802.11a (i.e. The link
budget is the total of Receiver sensitivity and transmitter
power, less losses between the two end points, thus it
represents the distance that can be covered and/or
penetration thru obstructions. So WiMax can deliver a link
budget that is at most twice as good as 802.11a, and in the
scope of things this is not very much compared to the total
link budgets used in outdoor links).
If you say, ok, lets use licensed spectrum, then you can get
long distances OR NLOS. If you really want to deliver multi
MBps and be able to use laptops inside buildings as CPE,
you'll still need microcell sites on the scale of 1 or 2 mile
radius of coverage and use multiple WATTS of power. WiMax
uses sophisticated base stations and relatively dump CPE. So
each micro-cell basestation would be relatively expensive
(compared to 802.11, but definitely cheaper than cellphone
basestations).
AND you would have to buy the spectrum to create the
coverage. At this point in time, in the US, the only spectrum
that has half decent propagation characteristics and is
available for this application in big enough chunks to be
useful is the 2.5Ghz MMDS frequencies. These are already
owned by primarily 3 corporations, plus a bunch of
educational institutions (the later still holding on to it
for "educational" distance learning TV).
So there is a customer base of maybe a handful of companies
to buy and buildout licensed networks. Two of the license
owners failed already in building out an MMDS network, the
third is a "new" company, Clearwire, who bought spectrum from
Worldcom. This does not represent a robust marketplace needed
to drive a rapidly evolving technology. Its more like a
legacy Telco marketplace that will have to compete against
DSL and Cable Modem in the urban/suburban markets that
represent the bulk of the potential end user marketplace. It
will not be subsidized by a parallel home / enterprise
networking marketplace as will 802.11.
Finally, the WiMax industry has (in terms of active, as
opposed to paper members) one giant company, Intel, and
scores of small, mostly barely surviving wireless equipment
companies that had already spent most of their efforts on
proprietary LMDS or MMDS technology and then threw their hats
into WiMax as a way to try to keep going. Most of these
companies plan to offer proprietary enhancements to their
WiMax products to "differentiate" from the competitors. So
there are already way too many companies involved in WiMax
than there will be demand for their products. So we can
expect that when the hype dies down most of the companies will fail.
Sometime in the near future, I would expect that Intel will
drop out of most activity with WiMax. They will realize that
they need to get back to their "knitting" as AMD is
challenging their core business and that there is never going
to be the kind of volume in WiMax chipsets that is needed to
keep Intel's interest.
There are a few WiMax companies, that will do very well for
themselves. Companies such as Alvarian, who are already a
leader in the outdoor, wide area wireless network equipment
even before WiMax, who understand the market and have the
distribution channel / customer base. This niche will grow
with the lower costs for this style of rural and Multiple
Business Unit (MDU) type network buildouts that can afford
the price points that WiMax will end up with. But it will not
be a mass market.
In conclusion, Wi-Fi will out evolve and deliver connectivity
at costs dramatically lower than WiMax. WiMax / 802.16 is
just starting on its path to evolution, has a much smaller
base of innovators and chipset growth volume. Wi-Fi is
already far along on its core learning curve, has an easy
order of magnitude larger base of innovators / investors and
chipset growth volume. WiMax hype will sputter out to reality
of a niche backhaul and rural marketplace, Wi-Fi/802.11 will
evolve and grow into many more realms and dominate the Local
Area Network
(LAN) / Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) / Metro Area Network (MAN).
On 11/23/04 4:04 AM, "David Farber" <dave@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: "Robert C. Atkinson" <rca53@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: November 23, 2004 6:24:47 AM EST
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: WiMAX vs. Wi-Fi
Dave:
From the recent IP posting on the legislation to block municipal
Wi-Fi
in Philadelphia:
"why, exactly, is Philly planning on spending huge piles on
Wi-Fi when
WiMAX could do it cheaper in around the same time frame it'll take
them to actually deploy?"
Is this true? Why will WiMAX be cheaper in an urban setting? When
will WiMAX really be available? I think there are some
WiMAX skeptics
that would disagree. Perhaps a discussion on IP would be
illuminating.
Bob
--
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
Voice: 408-882-4755 eFax: +1-408-490-2868
http://www.ibd.com
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