The Many Faces of Unlicensed WiMAX

Licensed WiMAX is not the only game in town, and due to the high cost of acquiring licenses, unlicensed WiMAX is often the technology of choice for some of today's hottest applications.

The debate over the merits of licensed vs. unlicensed WiMAX has been raging for years, but the fact of the matter always has been, and will remain, that both licensed and unlicensed WiMAX have considerable opportunities in today's broadband landscape. Though vendors and different industry organizations will often try to persuade otherwise, the licensed and unlicensed WiMAX solutions are not at war, and they are often not even competing for the same types of applications.

Simply put, tier one service providers that are deploying mobile WiMAX have traditionally been committed to licensed WiMAX solutions, while tier 2-3 service providers and WISPs that are providing primarily fixed wireless broadband access have traditionally championed unlicensed WiMAX solutions. Now, that's not to say that the use of licensed or unlicensed WiMAX is ALWAYS tied to either mobile or fixed service (respectively), but for the most part that is the case.

What's the Difference?

For many, the difference between licensed and unlicensed WiMAX technologies remains unclear. So before we dive into the primary opportunities and applications for unlicensed WiMAX, let's break down some of the key differentiators:

• Primary Markets - Licensed WiMAX tends to be used primarily in urban markets, while unlicensed WiMAX is the technology of choice for the rural markets.
• Primary Applications - Licensed WiMAX is most often used for Mobile WiMAX deployments such as Clearwire's services. Unlicensed WiMAX tends to cater to the fixed broadband wireless access/last mile access markets for rural and under-served areas; connectivity/backhaul for wireless video surveillance; and connectivity/backhaul for Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS) and transportation applications.
• Interference - Licensed WiMAX is regulated so each Service Provider owns their own frequency bands so will not get interference from other Service Providers. Unlicensed WiMAX is unregulated so each Service Provider needs to be a nice neighbor and ensure they do not interfere with other networks. Having 480MHz of spectrum available in the 5GHz unlicensed band provides amble flexibility to avoid interference with other operators.
• Cost - Securing frequency licenses for licensed WiMAX can cost billions of dollars. This massive up-front cost often prohibits the use of the technology for many providers. But for unlicensed WiMAX, there is no cost for frequencies. Cost of equipment is the only up-front cost.
• Time to Deploy - Licensed WiMAX can take several months to apply for and acquire desired frequencies, and requires extensive pre-planning. Unlicensed WiMAX is much faster time to market due to limited restrictions.
• Capacity - Lower frequency bands (such as licensed WiMAX) have smaller channel sizes(1-7 MHz max.), and thus, less total capacity available. This makes licensed WiMAX ideal for voice, but sub-optimal for data. Unlicensed WiMAX supports 480MHz of spectrum in most countries with channel sizes up to and exceeding 40MHz, thus increasing your max. capacity by more than 5x over licensed - making it optimal for broadband data.

Primary Applications

As mentioned above, the cost benefits of unlicensed WiMAX over licensed WiMAX are pretty extreme due to the billions of dollars required to obtain licensed frequencies in the first place. That fact alone often dictates when and where licensed can or cannot be used, and drives the demand for unlicensed WiMAX in many markets where the cost of licensed technologies is not justifiable. Below are several key markets where the high performance and significantly reduced cost of unlicensed WiMAX make it an ideal technology.

Last-Mile Access for Rural Areas

WiMAX has long been pegged as the saving grace for providing broadband to rural, under-served communities throughout the world. But when determining which variant (licensed or unlicensed) is better suited for deploying last-mile access to these under-served areas, it's important to remember the primary reason why many of these areas don't have access in the first place. Simply put, the cost of extending service via fiber or other wired technologies has outweighed the potential return the major carriers could expect based on the small populations of people in these rural areas.

With wired technologies like fiber or copper, the combination of the high cost of goods as well as the cost associated with trenching or stringing that wire for long distances to rural areas was the prohibiting factor. Similarly, with licensed WiMAX, the high cost of applying for and acquiring licensed frequencies has also made it an unrealistic option for extending broadband service to remote communities - despite the distance benefits that WiMAX links provide.

Unlicensed WiMAX, however, provides an ideal balance of high-performance, long-distance functionality at a significantly lower cost. As a result, carriers, ISPs and WISPs are able to cost-effectively extend broadband service to remote rural areas. And due to the significant upfront cost savings, these service providers are able to recognize a much quicker return on investment (ROI), even though the population of subscribers in these areas is smaller.

Wireless Video Surveillance

Another burgeoning market that unlicensed WiMAX has carved out a well-defined niche in is the video surveillance market (see my earlier article on The Wireless Video Sureveillance Opportunity). This is a market whose growth has exploded over the past 5 years, and that ABI Research forecasts will be a $41 billion a year market by 2014.

This explosive growth and continued market potential is due to an increasing need for video surveillance to help secure the world's ports, airports, cities and transportation infrastructure as well as schools, hospitals, government and other critical environments. Now more than ever, organizational demands have hastened our search for better, more cost-effective security applications, and in many instances, rapid deployment of security systems has become essential. But as critical as improved security has become, budgets to accomplish this goal are by no means unlimited.

Organizations of all kinds are being challenged to install video surveillance in areas that are too remote, too costly or physically impossible to reach with additional cabling. As a result, unlicensed wireless solutions have been a boon to the video surveillance market as they enable the ability to cost-effectively leap over these barriers, allowing a virtually unlimited number of video surveillance cameras to be deployed quickly, easily and affordably.

In particular, unlicensed WiMAX has emerged as the premiere solution to provide the wireless backhaul and transmission of real-time video surveillance. As a wireless WAN technology, WiMAX was designed specifically with the efficient backhaul of broadband data, voice and video at its core. Unlike wireless mesh technologies, which provide unpredictable service for backhauling streaming video, WiMAX is deterministic with built in scheduled access and Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms to ensure the reliable delivery of video.

For more information on the benefits of wireless for video surveillance, download a free white paper here.

Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS) and Transportation

In recent years, there has been a large trend towards deploying video cameras at intersection to enable a number of traffic and transportation applications. One well-known program is the Red Light Running program, where cameras automatically detect cars that run red lights, snap a picture of their license plate, and send the driver a ticket.

Until recent years, the only realistic option for connecting the cameras at these intersections was to run a dedicated leased line to each camera at every intersection a city wished to deploy. This was not only an extremely costly solution, with leased lines running as much as $2,000 (in some cases more) per month, but installing a new dedicated wired line for each camera also required a great deal of labor, further driving up the cost and impeding the scalability of these systems. Many cities and towns simply don't have the budget to deploy wired or licensed systems, though.

Today, however, cities and counties are turning to unlicensed WiMAX technologies to remove the cost and complexity roadblocks that have prevented greater rollout of these programs. WiMAX, originally designed as a backhaul technology, has proven ideal for the increased bandwidths required by HD video cameras. And since today's wireless radios can not only backhaul the traffic from multiple cameras while (in some cases) powering co-located cameras directly from the radio via Power over Ethernet (PoE), unlicensed WiMAX and other high-bandwidth point-to-multipoint technologies are ideally suited to drive down the cost of traffic camera connectivity while greatly easing deployments.

This is Just the Beginning…

While the applications above are great examples of existing market opportunities where unlicensed WiMAX is thriving, these are just the beginning. In any application or deployment scenario where running fiber is deemed too costly, licensed WiMAX is also likely to be similarly cost-prohibitive. And that's where unlicensed WiMAX comes to the rescue, with many of the same technological benefits of licensed WiMAX, but at a fraction of the cost.

Conclusion

There are definitely huge market opportunities for both licensed and unlicensed WiMAX, but it is important to understand in which applications and opportunities each is relevant. For applications and markets where high-performance broadband access or connectivity is needed but where initial cost and a need for faster ROI are limiting factors, unlicensed WiMAX and other unlicensed PtMP technologies are the ideal solution for the following reasons:

• Elimination of the massive costs and delays of trenching for fiber or acquiring licensed frequencies
• Quickly deployed and configured - operational within hours
• Deploys virtually anywhere - across rugged terrain, bodies of water and remote areas
• Carrier-class reliability ensures non-stop security
• High capacity, configurable and secure broadband wireless for guaranteed QoS
• Enables real-time transmission from and control of surveillance cameras

For more information on the cost benefits of unlicensed WiMAX and other wireless technologies, get a free copy of a new analyst report from Craig Mathias, principal analyst at the Farpoint Group, titled "Wireline vs. Wireless: Exploring Total Cost of Ownership in Outdoor Applications." You can download a copy of the report for free here.



Robb Henshaw is the Director of Marketing & Communications at Proxim Wireless, a manufacturer of end-to-end broadband wireless systems, where he oversees the company's global marketing and communications efforts.  For the last 8 years he has been dedicated to helping develop the wireless industry, with expertise in technologies ranging from enterprise WLANs, to carrier-grade wireless backhaul, to WiMAX and point-to-multi point broadband wireless access (BWA) solutions. 
 

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 in Business  | Permalink |  Comments (1)