Category: Industry News

June 12, 2008

Nortel Moves to LTE, Away from WiMax

By Glenn Fleishman

Nortel was trumpeting its WiMax prowess last year: But they missed out on major contracts in the U.S., and so are shifting their focus to Long Term Evolution (LTE), the path for GSM operators (and Verizon) to fourth-generation networks. Three of the four major U.S. carriers are committed to LTE; Sprint is the lone WiMax holdout. Intel’s wireless chief made comments recently about pushing LTE and WiMax into a converged, compatible format, too. Nortel will partner with WiMax pioneer Alvarion to continue its WiMax work, but obviously is leaning on them, and putting its research and development money into LTE.

Posted by Glennf at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2008

Motorola Splits Handsets into Separate Firm

By Glenn Fleishman

Motorola bows to shareholder pressure, splits firm: The company will divide into two pieces in what Motorola hopes will be tax free to shareholders. One company will take the handset operations, which have languished; the other, enterprise, modem, and set-top boxes. This puts WiMax in the “good” company, the one that has a lot of potential to grow into a new international market, as well as continuing their sales of Canopy and fixed WiMax gear. The handset business would also encompass WiMax embedded into phones, but it’s likely a smaller part of Motorola’s WiMax portfolio.

Posted by Glennf at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)

January 8, 2008

Sprint Nextel Says WiMax on Track

By Glenn Fleishman

Nancy Gohring reports from the Consumer Electronics Show that Sprint maintains all is well in WiMax deployment: The firm said to a “small audience” at CES that they are right where they said they would be from a timing perspective. The company’s CTO, Barry West, said that the firm chose mobile WiMax over CDMA due to CDMA’s higher computational cost—and thus equipment cost—when handling larger swaths of spectrum. He also reaffirmed the network’s openness: any WiMax device a consumer buys will be allowed to run on the network.

A senior VP at Motorola noted that Motorola is involved in 60 WiMax trials worldwide, and Intel’s WiMax lead also said that “WiMax is bigger than Sprint.” True, but Sprint and Clearwire have the most scale committed anywhere in the world, and most of the rest of the world is involved in trials, not committed deployments. If they can’t build it here, they may not be able to build it anywhere, and the fortunes of several companies tumble alongside.

Posted by Glennf at 3:53 PM | Comments (0)

March 8, 2007

Professionals Book on WiMax from Prentice Hall

By Glenn Fleishman

Fundamentals of WiMax: Understanding Broadband Wireless Networking released: This 500 page book covers the broad range of detail necessary to understand WiMax networking. The book covers all the bases, looking in terms at IEEE standards, channeling, OFDM, MIMO, and OFDMA, as well as a variety of networking architecture and planning issues. I haven’t seen the book, but it looks like a comprehensive guide to those planning to work with WiMax in any technical capacity. (Find the best price for the book here; it lists for $70 and Amazon has it at $44.)

Posted by Glennf at 9:55 AM | Comments (0)