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June 24, 2005

Finland Chooses Flarion

By Nancy Gohring

A couple of days ago IPWireless announced a win in the Czech Republic and now it’s Flarion’s time in the sun: The winner of the 450 MHz license in Finland will use Flarion’s gear to build a nationwide network. The regulator requires the operator to lease the network to any interested service provider. A Flarion spokesman said that the network is expected to deliver the same data rates as any Flarion network, which is as much as 1.5 Mbps on the downlink and 300-500 Kbps on the uplink. Usually, the further down the spectrum you go, the harder it is to offer broadband, and 450 MHz is pretty low on the band.

The CDMA camp has also targeted the 450 MHz band and a couple of the applicants for this license would have used CDMA. There are probably a couple of reasons why those companies didn’t win. These days, most people in the wireless world agree that the future is OFDM so there could have been a perception that the CDMA gear would become obsolete sooner. Also, this is Europe where CDMA is generally reviled, so the choice could have had a bit of politics to it.

WiMax, or something like it, isn’t being optimized, as far as I know, for this low-band frequency, although it probably could be. Still, the more wins that the likes of IPWireless and Flarion get in Europe, the more mindshare they win, which makes them potential competitors to 802.16e.

Posted by nancyg at June 24, 2005 12:54 PM

Categories: competitive landscape

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