South African mobile operators have reacted less than enthusiastically to a visiting South Korean government delegation, which arrived here to showcase wireless broadband and digital multimedia broadcast technologies.
Unveiling the South Korean-developed products at the South Korea-SA ICT Business Forum last week, the visitors pointed fingers at the South African government's commitment to fixed-line telephony, which is hindering the exploration of mobile telecoms innovations.
Sang-Jin Lee, director-in-chief in Korea's information and communications industry, maintained that the WiBro product, a wireless broadband portable Internet technology, offers all the benefits of WiMax and overcomes problems of mobility facing WLAN technology. This, he states, makes the technology suitable for SA's underserviced rural areas.
High-speed broadband
According to the visiting South Koreans, WiBro offers a high-speed broadband connection that has a maximum upload rate of 1Mbps and download of 2Mbps per user. It operates in the 2.3GHz spectrum, has an aggregate data throughput of 20-30Mbps from base stations with a cell site radius of 1-5km.
WiBro was designed for data transmission, and to provide a stable connection for users even when large amounts of data, like high quality streaming videos, are being transmitted.
However, Sadiq Malik, business development director of Broadband Communication Technologies, believes WiBro would not be an effective technology to implement in South African rural areas.
WiMax is a more effective technology, he says, as it offers coverage of 25km radius, making the WiMax "hotspot" much larger than the WiBro "hot zone". As a result, operators need less capital investment for base stations with WiMax, as the larger area that WiMax can reach translates into a need for fewer stations. He also notes that in Korea, WiBro is being promoted for use in densely populated urban areas, not rural areas.
Malik notes that the proprietary nature of WiBro and its use of licensed spectrum 2.3GHz, which may not be available across the globe, may keep WiBro from becoming an international standard.
Uncertain
WiMax enjoys more support from telecoms providers and handset manufacturers, while WiBro's fate is still uncertain, Malik says.
Tertia Smit, an analyst at BMI-TechKnowledge, agrees that WiMax enjoys wider support than WiBro. She points out that LG Electronics and Nokia number among WiMax supporters, while Intel is also putting weight behind WiMax. Intel has been instrumental in convincing the Korean players to join in the global effort to standardise telecoms technologies, she says.
Smit, however, notes that Intel has signed a memorandum of understanding with Korea Telecoms and South Korea Telecoms, two of Korea's biggest telecoms providers (the first a fixed-line provider, the second a cellular provider), in an effort to make WiBro compliant to the international standards and interoperable with WiMax. Intel will also provide the engineering support for this effort, she says.
Smit adds that South African mobile companies have already invested in HSDPA technology and related base stations, so they are unlikely to consider another technology until they've extracted a return on their investment. She notes that Telkom has conducted WiMax trials, Sentech uses CDMA, and the second national operator has not communicated its technology of choice.
She points out that one or more of these players could still choose WiBro in the future, if they were convinced the efforts of the Korean manufacturers to comply with the 802.16e standardisation efforts would be enough to guarantee a flexible migration from their current technologies.
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