The country's bandwidth saviour?

The term WiMax, which is frequently used as a 'catch-all' term to describe anything wireless, is, in fact, an industry coalition that was formed with the intention of advancing the IEEE 802.16 standard for broadband wireless access. Short for wireless interoperability for microwave access, WiMax was formed in April 2001, the year the 802.16 specification was first published.

Today, WiMax is being heralded by the equipment vendors, at any rate, as the latest and greatest, the fastest and most fantastic wireless broadband option yet. VANS (value-added network service) providers, ISPs and even the analyst houses, on the other hand, have taken a more (sensible) circumspect approach.

The WiMax family of protocols (16a: the 10GHz to 66GHz range, 16d: fixed wireless broadband in the 2GHz to 11GHz range, and 16e: mobile wireless broadband, which is yet to be published) offer what is sometimes referred to as 4G or 4.5G (although it is not actually a cellular technology), namely, the next evolution in both downlink and uplink speeds.

The WiMax Forum says: "In a typical cell radius deployment of three to ten kilometres, WiMax Forum Certified systems can be expected to deliver capacity of up to 40Mbps per channel for fixed and portable access applications. Mobile network deployments are expected to provide up to 15Mbps of capacity within a typical cell radius deployment of up to three kilometres."

What all this means in plain English is that WiMax is a viable alternative to Diginet lines; at least that's according to certain industry players.

Says Business Connexion's group strategy executive Willem van Rensburg: "The short and sweet version is that we are seeing CIOs and organisations starting to benefit from using wireless rather than digital lines. A lot of that has to do with time to deployment and cost. If digital line infrastructure was as available - and available at the same price - a lot of people wouldn't use the wireless option."

MTN Network Solutions head Mike Brierly, whose company is in the process of deploying WiMax networks in Cameroon and Uganda, disagrees. "I think WiMax has a very specific role to play in the market for quite specific types of clients and services. It shouldn't be seen as a replacement technology for Diginet.

"Wireless technology inherently has physical issues, which one notices when one uses cellular technology - quality, line-of-sight, distance from the base station and latency issues. There are inherent reliability issues too, things like the weather's impact [on quality and reliability]."

Despite what the equipment vendors would have us believe, WiMax quality is affected by the weather. How badly quality will be affected depends on which frequency is being used. As a general rule, the lower the frequency, the less it is affected by the weather. For example, users of 2.5GHz frequencies will have fewer problems in terms of packet loss than those using a higher spectrum. That said, higher frequencies do have a greater ability to correct errors, so weather does not have a significant impact on performance.

"There are external factors," BCX's Van Rensburg notes. "If you turn the antenna, you can lose signal, or if the radio gets stolen. It happens. The environmental considerations [weather and geography] around wireless have more of an impact than you would experience from a line from Telkom. If there was more bandwidth available at a cheap price and quickly, I would opt for that instead. The driver for all of this is the cost and availability factor."

Business Connexion has already deployed WiMax to several of its clients locally.

WiMax has a very specific role to play in the market for quite specific types of clients and services.

Mike Brierly, head, MTN Network Solutions

Internet Solutions' Jeff Fletcher believes WiMax offers a better solution to the problem of last mile access than HSDPA does.

"With HSDPA, you're tacking data onto the other end of the voice network. The closest analogy is using ISDN for voice. It's an add-on. HSDPA was not designed for VOIP [data], whereas WiMax was designed from the ground up to handle VOIP. Furthermore, HSDPA is cost per bit, [making it] much more expensive than WiMax. For the cellular operators to compete [on voice and data] they will need to forgo what has been done with HSDPA and build WiMax networks, hence the Vodacom/iBurst deal and MTN's recent WiMax trials.

"WiMax is a better last mile delivery platform for data than HSDPA will be, but WiMax has yet to be proven as a voice platform," he says.

"You can run VOIP on it; the question is whether users will accept the voice quality they get on WiMax compared to the voice quality they get on a cellphone. Then again, given the costs, they'd probably be prepared to accept less quality."

Spescom Telecommunications CEO Thomas Makore concurs: "WiMax competes with technologies like ADSL, which is dependent on copper last mile to reach the user. Copper means the cost of laying lines, the material cost of copper, digging in the ground, copper theft and so on. And in SA, where the penetration of copper lines into residential areas is 20% at best, it would be a daunting task to deploy copper to all households. With WiMax, you put in a base station and have a connection to the user. It provides advantages of reach at a much cheaper price than copper."

From a services point of view, says Motorola regional sales manager for Africa Gino Mills, WiMax enables triple-play.

"3G has its limits," he says, "but WiMax goes to 4 or 4.5G, which, for example, will allow you to download and play movies on a mobile phone [once phones with WiMax connectivity are available]. It's about speed and bandwidth," he notes.

WiMax supplies both, whether to corporate customers using it as complementary to Diginet or as an alternative, or consumers accessing the network via mobile devices.

If digital line infrastructure was as available - and available at the same price - a lot of people wouldn't use the wireless option.

Willem van Rensburg, group strategy executive, Business Connexion

All of the above is moot, however, until the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) completes its spectrum allocation process.

Says MTN's Brierly: "MTN Network Solutions had spectrum temporarily allocated to it and used that to do extensive testing of equipment from various suppliers, proof-of-concept-type stuff. Subsequent to that, we applied for spectrum in the 3.5GHz range, which was turned down. We've since applied for spectrum in the 2.6GHz range and are still waiting [for an answer]."

Adds RapidCloud CEO Arnoud du Nooy, whose company has been rolling out WiMax networks in other African countries: "While we have seen no services deployed to date, a number of people have access to spectrum to do this, including Sentech, WBS (but not 3.5GHz spectrum), Telkom, Neotel and to a limited degree, the USALs [underserviced area licensees].

"The idea is that the USALs have access to anything they want on application, but in practice we've not seen it being so simple to implement through ICASA. There have been delays on getting spectrum issued to the USALs we have worked with.

"What I can say," he adds, "is that all of the players have gone out on tender for WiMax [equipment and proof of concepts] and either have or are evaluating products. In some cases, the results of the tenders are already known, as in the case of Telkom. We expect to see services deployed in the next six months."

Says Internet Solutions' Fletcher: "The last major move on the part of the regulator was to ask for submissions from the general public and industry as to how people think spectrum should be allocated, how it should be charged for and who should get it, effectively trying to determine the best way forward.

"The challenge ICASA faces is the same one it faced a while back when trying to decide on the SNO [second national operator]. The longer there's indecision, the more the business plans of new entrants become eroded. A further challenge it faces is to decide if the need for competition outweighs the need for universal deployment. The two outcomes are often at odds with one another. The regulator either needs to decide on following government policy [in terms of universal access provision] or a good competitive telecoms landscape."

While the industry once again waits for ICASA, WiMax is being rolled out to a limited extent by VANS providers like Business Connexion, which is permitted to use the public (ISM) frequencies. Although WiMax may not be an ideal Diginet alternative, given the local telecommunications environment, and the cost and lengthy delays in getting Diginet (and other) lines installed, it may just be a saviour for companies desperate for bandwidth able to cope with 21st century applications.