Document Actions
Alvarion Scores Major WiMAX Win in the US
This week WiMAX equipment provider Alvarion announced that had been selected by US broadband provider Open Range Communications, Inc. to build a 4G wireless network covering 17 states, 546 rural communities and reaching up to 6 million people. The $100M deal spans 5 years and represents the largest deal to date for the company.
Open Range Communications began moving forward with its plans after receiving
funding of $374M earlier this year to build out its network - including a $274
loan from the USDA's Rurual Utilities Service (RUS) and $100M from One Equity
Partners. The funds received from RUS are from its annual re-reoccurring
program and separate from the US Broadband Stimulus Funds being released later
this year. The company plans to begin deploying the network in Q3 with the
first services offered in Q4 this year.
Open Range plans to use WiMAX technology to deliver broadband services to
un-served and underserved communities in America - offering portable and
eventually mobile voice and internet services to its planned coverage areas
including western states California, Colorado and Nevada; Midwestern states
Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Nebraska; southern states Arkansas,
Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina; and eastern states Pennsylvania,
New York, New Jersey and Delaware.
"We are excited that we are able to be involved in such a visionary program that
can bring broadband services to un-served and underserved areas to the rural
US," said Greg Daily, President for Alvarion North America. "You are
looking at a 4G state-of-the-art network that is going to roll into rural
America, similar to a metropolitan area and frankly, better than a lot of
metropolitan networks."
The network will be built on Alvarion's WiMAX Forum® Certified™ 802.16e
BreezeMAX® solution utilizing spectrum in the upper 2.4GHz ATC band, based on an
arrangement with mobile satellite and data provider Globalstar. Last
November, Globalstar received an Order and Authorization ruling from the FCC
allowing Globalstar's spectrum to be used for Ancillary Terrestrial Component (ATC)
services in the US.
"Its a ground breaking project from many perspectives," said Daily. "In
addition to our own RAN (radio access network) solutions and CPE (customer
premise equipment), we are also integrating the backhaul, IP core and ASN
gateway and AAA server functionalities. In terms of the network build-out,
we are the lead system integrator."
The deal reflects a major milestone for Alvarion and perhaps offers a glimpse of
the types of deals to come. For the past 18 months, the company has been
signing-up smaller turn-key projects including ICE in Costa Rica and VMAX in
Taiwan, but this one is unprecedented in terms of size and scope. Open
Range reflects the second service provider for Alvarion that has received Rural
Utilities Services (RUS) funding. In April, Main Street Broadband
announced that it had selected to deploy Alvarion equipment after securing $34M
in RUS funding.
The announcement sends a strong signal for the overall wireless broadband
industry and WiMAX technology in particular. With the first Notice of
Funds Availability (NOFAs) from the Broadband Stimulus Funds due out at the end
of this month and subsequent release of funds later this year, I'm sure we can
expect to see more of these deals in the near future.
_____
tags:
Open Range and Globalstar collaboration on spectrum use
In contrast, all the other rural WiMAX deployments I've heard about are in the 3.65G Hz lightly licensed band, using 802.16d fixed WiMAX. See my earlier post and comment on this news item:
http://www.wimax360.com/profiles/blogs/alvarion-gets-100-million
2.4 Ghz?
2.4Ghz is also used by cordless phones and Wifi. Isn't this going to interfere? Or are they just referring to 2.5Ghz as "upper 2.4Ghz"?
Alvarion, WiMAX 2.4GHz
Whether a system or network is WiMAX will come down to what users can do with it: can they buy devices that were made to operate on a 2.3-2.5GHz WiMAX mobile network that will also work on their unofficial spectrum?
The health of he ecosystem that develops chips, devices and equipment benefits from all the knock-off versions.
Let's just call everything WiMAX and we can show huge growth! ; ^)
2.4 Ghz? WiMAX Forum Profiles?
As a long time telecom standards professional (I started with X.25 and X.21 in 1978), I am very disappointed in the lack of transparency of the WiMAX Forum. They do not list their agreed upon profiles (for selected frequencies) or any other specs to non-members. IEEE 802.16 doesn't even refer to the technology as WiMAX (it's called Wireless MAN) and they don't specify the exact spectrum use. I am surprised that the ITU-R hasn't taken over end to end WiMAX standards from the WiMAX Forum
Alan Weissberger, ScD and IEEE ComSoc SCV Program Chair
Alvarion Scores Major Win
What this is:
A large contract in terms of size and scope.
In size, this is among the largest WiMAX deployments. For Alvarion, this is probably the largest single contract to date. According to Alvarion, it represents about 10% of projected during its duration. Alvarion typically has small orders with very few and far between exceeding 5% of sales.
In terms of scope, Alvarion will provide the integration of RAN and higher level functions. This is important for Alvarion to work up the supply chain to do more business with large operators, particularly the incumbent mobile operators who have grown to expect turn-key deployments and which can include network and some extent of back office operations management as well.
This comes at a good point in the proposal and funding process for RUS and other government programs. Of course Alvarion hopes this win influences other operator's vendor choices in the U.S. but we can't know the degree of success spill over until information leaks or awards are announced.
What this isn't:
It isn't a mandate for large scale mobile deployments. It is not necessarily a foot in the door for turn-key or 'fully mobile' network deployments. The scale and scope of the business is starting to move into the ballpark for mobile deployment contracts but direct experience in that segment is measured based on dense deployments of fully mobile, fully loaded networks. This has been a problem for all of the WiMAX pure plays... a 'chicken and egg' hurdle.
But while tier 1 operators may not think that this order places Alvarion squarely in the ranks of their much larger mobile network competitors, it does raise eyebrows and probably opens doors for more serious consideration of proposals. We can't read the minds of every individual decision maker but think that Alvarion probably stands a better chance to become a secondary supplier for Clearwire and similar operators. While the long term objective may be to be considered equally to Motorola, Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia and others, there remains a big gap in size and ability to support incumbent networks and services. The fact remains that a secondary supply contract for a multi-billion dollar deployment can be larger than a prime contract that is nice but only covers 6 million POPs.
Robert Syputa