Navini Drives Mass-Market Consumer Broadband

Interview with Sai Subramanian, Navini Vice President of Product Management and Strategic Marketing

Utilization of Smart Beamforming Technology Results in Higher Network Performance and Lower Operating Costs

Few companies understand the personal broadband market better than Navini Networks. The company, based in Richardson, Texas and with sales and development officers throughout the world, has been marketing its own flavor of personal wireless broadband equipment before WIMAX and the 802.16e standards were even conceived.

"We are very unique in this space because before Navini, most broadband was fixed and not mobile," says Sai Subramanian, Navini Vice President of Product Management and Strategic Marketing. "We came into this market 7 years ago with a very consumer-centric view of broadband for the mass market and with plug and play, portable/mobile functionality."

SMART BEAMFORMING

At the core of Navini's technology is a signal processing technique known as beamforming. Navini has patented and branded certain aspects of beamforming as 'Smart Beamforming™' which it believes is necessary to enable personal broadband for the mass market. Navini is also marketing SmartWiMAX™ as the combination of mobile WiMAX with Smart Beamforming & MIMO technologies.

Beamforming techniques involve leveraging the arrays of the transmitting and receiving antennas to control the directionality and shape of the radiation pattern. When receiving a signal, beamforming can increase the receiver sensitivity in the direction of wanted signals and decrease the sensitivity in the direction of interference and noise. When transmitting a signal, beamforming can increase the power in the direction the signal is to be sent.

WiMAX systems can utilize beamforming as a means to further increase system coverage and capacity and can surpass the capabilities of MIMO technologies alone. Beamforming techniques are optional features in the 802.16e standard, but leading vendors are taking advantage of them to boost network performance.

"Our core technology has been and still is centered on smart beam forming," says Subramanian. "This technology is about how to make your wireless link deliver broadband in a consumer context. We believe that our smart beam forming technology will enable WiMAX to become the personal broadband vision. Smart Beam Forming Technology and MIMO are absolutely essential if you are doing mass-market broadband."

"The advantages of smart beamforming technology is that it results in a higher link budget, which in turn gives an operator better coverage and capacity," says Subramanian. "The combination of smart beam forming and MIMO results in an even higher throughput and system capacity and this is a key portion of mobile WiMAX which is sometimes overlooked."

Subramanian further added, "Other advantages are higher spectral efficiency because you have reduced the interference from other cells and you get more bits per hertz". You not only get a higher link budget on the downlink, but you also get a higher link budget on the uplink, so you are able to deal with low powered devices much easier than otherwise. All of which results in lower capex and a better business case."

DEPLOYMENTS

Navini's focus has always been and continues to be focused on large scale deployments and is credited with some of the largest personal broadband networks built to date. "Our typical customer is anyone who is going after mass-market broadband as opposed to those that are going after T1 replacements," says Subramanian.

"We have 60 or 70 operators deployed around the world and lay claim to probably 2 or 3 of the largest networks delivering personal broadband," says Subramanian. The biggest one would probably be Unwired Australia - one piece of that network covers all of Sydney, which is about 2000 square kilometers."

The company leverages plug-n-play broadband wireless access solutions to simplify the installation and reduce costs for its operators. Navini's non-line-of-sight (NLOS) solution consists of customer modems, base stations, and element management systems (EMS) that run in the full range of spectrums with software upgrades to the IEEE 802.16e standard.

"In Australia, this is definitely a portable deployment - there is no installation and its completely mass market as consumers can go to a store and buy a modem," says Subramanian. "We also offer a PC card which is also commercially deployed."

In the US, the Navini has been working with a number of different providers including Horizon Wi-Com, which recently announced the deployment of its high-speed broadband network in nine Northeast Region U.S. cities, utilizing the WCS A Block spectrum previously owned by Verizon.

According to the company, the networks are serving customers on a trial basis with a full commercial deployment planned shortly. Overall, the provider plans to provide internet access to residential and business users in markets containing approximately 70 million POPs.

The Horizon Wi-Com deployment features Navini's Smart WiMAX solution which combines Mobile WiMAX with the Smart Beamforming technology which can reportedly double the data throughput for WiMAX subscribers, which in turn will allow Horizon Wi-Com to deploy less base stations with more complete coverage and higher speeds.

As for WiMAX certification, Navini expects to be ready as the first wave of mobile WiMAX certifications begin to happen this year. "Nobody, including us can make the claim of having Mobile WiMAX Certified Equipment just yet, as certification has not begun, but Navini has over a quarter million end users using the smart beam forming technology today and getting the benefits of what a WiMAX network ought to deliver."

PARTNER ECOSYSTEM

Navini's experience in personal broadband has given it some early advantages in building its partnerships. "Navini is part of the larger WiMAX ecosystem, but we have also been working on its own broadband ecosystem for the last seven years and of course the two intersect. We have a number of partnerships on the equipment side, services side, VARS and various System integrators," says Subramanian. The company also has its own professional services with a full blown field services operations team and partners that can provide a full turn key solutions.

Although Navini is private and does not disclose financials, the company has been experiencing tremendous growth over the past few years with an estimated 50-100% increase in revenue each of the last few years. The company also recently raised an additional $50M in capital to fuels its growth and announced separate partnerships deals with ASUS and Verso to market modems and provide VoIP over WiMAX capabilities, respectively.

Under the agreement with ASUS, one of the largest ODMs in the world, both companies will jointly develop certified Mobile WiMAX subscriber modems to be marketed under Navini's Ripwave® brand. These modems will use chips from several vendors and will support Mobile WiMAX features such as Beamforming and MIMO Matrix A (Space-Time Coding). The agreement includes a commitment to Mobile WiMAX interoperability certification by the WiMAX Forum™certification test labs.

With the partnership with Verso announced in March, both company plan to capitalize on the growing globally VoIP over WiMAX market by introducing Class 5 telephony features to WiMAX networks. The alliance will bring the Verso's VoIP Overlay softswitch platform to Navini's WiMAX access infrastructure and enable end user's access to Voice over Broadband (VoBB) applications such as prepaid, voicemail and hosted PBX.

As compared to other wireless technologies, Navini sees significant advantages for WiMAX. "From a wireless broadband perspective, Mobile WiMAX has a substantial lead over other competing technologies for wireless broadband," says Subramanian.

"Mobile WiMAX is the key technology to watch. From our perspective, we see the WiMAX market accelerating very rapidly. We anticipate 2008 will be a very significant year for Navini and for Mobile WiMAX deployments."