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WiMAX IPTV HDTV?
You can barely do it on copper wire.
"You can't do HDTV on WiMAX," said the guy in the front row at the seminar I gave in Utah last week for regional telcos. Given the necessities of their rural market, these service providers were already well-versed in triple and quadruple play. I admit the contrarian had a point for a fleeting moment in time. When we look at the advances in WiMAX throughput necessary to support HDTV and compare it with the cost elements of other telecom technologies, the other technologies don't look so hot. My hosts offer HDTV to their cable TV subscribers. Bandwidth needed per set is 19 Mbps.
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal (19 DEC 06) discussed AT&T's IPTV over copper wire product U-verse. It can do HDTV but only one TV per household can run HDTV. The article went on to mention Verizon's ambitious fiber to the premise project that will cost them $18 billion. An earlier WSJ article put the cost at about $2,000 per home served.
True, a simple fixed WiMAX radio running in unicast, assuming 40 Mbps per channel, might support all of two HDTV simultaneous sessions at 19 Mbps (assumes no special compression techniques). That simple radio + antenna + CPE might cost $5,000. Very, very simply put, that might be $500 more than what Verizon is spending per subscriber on their fiber to the home ($5,000/2 = $2,500/home or TV in use). Obviously, these are not very enticing numbers for any service provider.
How will WiMAX do HDTV IPTV over WiMAX? Lets fast forward one year and look at a matrix of opportunities. First, IPTV compression schemes will benefit all forms of access (copper wire, coax, satellite, and WiMAX). Getting the bandwidth demands down to a few hundred Kbps will help all concerned. Second, incorporating multicast technologies into WiMAX radios will improve the economics for HDTV IPTV over WiMAX. Third, great gains are being made in MIMO and other radio + antenna technologies such that the simple radio described above will have four times the throughput. Supporting that throughput is an ever- improving range of backhaul technologies. GigE backhaul radios now offer 2 Gig of throughput over a few miles. At $20,000 to $30,000 per link, this beats the financial pants off a fiber to the premise or U-verse copper wire scenario.
Against this sort of "cheaper, simpler, smaller and more convenient to use" (definition of disruptive technology) copper wire access technologies will not be able to compete with WiMAX in delivering HDTV IPTV. Ultimately, coax and satellite will not be able to compete with WiMAX in cost per sub and ARPU either.
Frank Ohrtman
WMX Systems
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