WiMAX Applications

 

WiMAX has already revolutionised the broadband wireless market by standardising the hitherto fragmented Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) market, by opening up new service opportunities and by creating the environment for ubiquitous broadband services everywhere.

 

WiMAX creates a bridge between the fixed wireline and mobile cellular networks. By deploying WiMAX technology in their networks, operators are able to offer not just fixed broadband wireless services to homes and businesses but are also be able to offer anytime, anywhere mobile access to IP services at much higher speeds than is possible with voice-centric 3G networks.

 

The aim is to provide the service that best fits the individual's needs, whether relaxing at home, working in the office or on the move. WiMAX has the versatility to provide a transparent umbrella of service provision across a range of wireless and wireline access technologies.

 

Let's consider the IEEE 802.16e-2005 applications under three headings: Mobile broadband, Fixed broadband and backhaul and bridging applications.

 

Mobile Broadband

 

Broadband anytime-anywhere is the great promise of WiMAX, which has arrived with Mobile WiMAX products.

 

IEEE 802.16e-2005 standard takes broadband wireless to a new plane.

 

Suddenly it is possible to have a DSLlike broadband experience anywhere you happen to be, not just at home or in a Wi-Fi hot spot environment. With WiMAX we start to get Hot Zones that are a few kilometres wide and the broadband experience moves outdoors.

 

Mobile broadband opens up a whole new high-speed data experience, which cannot be matched by the other mobile technologies available today. Imagine you are walking in the park, when you spot an unusual butterfly and want to find out more about it. You take a high definition picture of the butterfly and send it to a centralized database, which within seconds comes up with a match and a detailed description of that species. The possibilities are truly endless.

 

Airspan has grasped this vision and has set out to design and develop a range of products to fully exploit the potential of Mobile WiMAX. To this end we have developed the HiperMAX and HiperMAX-micro base stations using SDR technology to ensure soft upgrade of the base station to support the latest version of the mobile WiMAX services without requiring hardware changes.

 

Airspan has also recognized that Mobile WiMAX requires diverse and plentiful WiMAX enabled end-user devices and is developing the first quad-band 16eUSB devices for laptop computer. Find out more in this document.

 

Fixed Broadband Wireless Access

 

The pre-WiMAX broadband wireless access space is a confusing and fragmented place where many proprietary solutions compete for market share. It has been crying out for standardisation and interoperability. Fixed WiMAX answers this call and sets out to resolve the key problem areas that have hampered the explosive growth of wireless broadband technology.

 

Airspan's Fixed WiMAX solution delivers outdoor, as well as end-user installed indoor CPEs which eliminates the notorious truck roll this cuts the price of CPEs and makes the whole proposition much more attractive.

 

In developed countries the last 10 years have seen extensive deployment of DSL and cable in urban and suburban areas. However, DSL penetration in rural or less densely populated areas continues to lag behind due to problems with the copper plant.

 

Therefore Fixed WiMAX technology is a good solution for bringing broadband services to customers in these poorly served areas.

 

Airspan's MicroMAX product provides a cost effective solution in low density deployment scenarios.

 

In emerging economies, the priority is to serve the urban and suburban communities with essential telecommunications services followed by the expansion of services to other regions. When the underlying infrastructure may not be of sufficiently high quality to enable widespread DSL deployment, WiMAX solutions such as AS.MAX offer an effective answer by providing a range of base stations to meet the varying requirements of urban and rural deployments as well as a range of easy to deploy and cost effective CPEs.

 

Backhaul and Bridging Applications

 

WiMAX products also lend themselves to backhaul and bridging applications.

 

In some networks it will be attractive to use a WiMAX compliant point-to-point link to backhaul the traffic from a WiMAX base station back towards the core network. In other cases WiMAX compliant products will be called upon to provide LAN-to-LAN bridging solutions for enterprise networks or indeed providing IP connectivity.

 

Airspan's MicroMAX product range is particularly suitable for PTP backhaul applications providing high availability with native IP interfaces, in both licensed and unlicensed bands.

 

 

Wi-Fi with WiMAX Backhaul