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Soma Networks discusses FDD-TDD coexistence, IPR issues and the overall industry roadmap & challenges.
Maravedis: Soma has been a low profile player in the WiMAX market, what now?
Soma Networks: As a pioneer in broadband wireless, our experience in the market has helped us in a number of ways as we begin to see deployments with Mobile WiMAX: we remain the recognized leader in the ability to provide toll-quality VoIP and fax, we understand our customers' business and technical issues when deploying a broadband wireless services business and our products deploy easily, quickly with the highest quality subscriber experience. We continue to gain significant momentum in broadband-to-the-home market opportunities, whether in urban and rural developing markets, competitive broadband providers and rural markets in developed markets.
Maravedis: Tell us about your WiMAX platform, When do you expect certification? What are your priorities?
Soma Networks: The FlexMAX Mobile WiMAX System is comprised of compact base, radio units and ASN gateways, and several non-line of site subscriber units (mobile stations) including indoor desktop gateway and PCMCIA card and an outdoor subscriber device. Our plan is to be among the first to be certified in the first half of 2007. In the meantime, we continue to participate in the WiMAX Forum's Interoperability "Plugfests", which remain a good way for all vendors to test the ultimate goal of the Mobile WiMAX Standard, which is device interoperability.
Maravedis: Tell us a bit about your current most notable customers and deployments.
Soma Networks: AT&T announced a deployment in Pahrump, Nevada using our FlexMAX platform. The success of this deployment, in terms of growth and our technology, proves that the broadband-to-the-home market shows great opportunity and SOMA's ability to serve this market. Earlier this year we announced Milmex, a competitive provider in Krakow, Poland, also showing strong growth. In the coming months we will be announcing several new rural, independent service providers in North America. We have several trials underway in South East Asia and the Middle East, but we aren't able to disclose them at this time.
Maravedis: Tell us about the AT&T current and future deployments and expectations?
Soma Networks: We can't really discuss the details of this deployment, but it has exceeded our expectations in terms of rapid market acceptance for broadband wireless. As with any of our customers, AT&T's main concerns continue to be subscriber satisfaction. This means a deployable platform for multimedia broadband services that can scale quickly without service quality problems, and we believe that SOMA provides the optimal solution to meet this requirement.
Maravedis: Do operators care more about performance or certification?
Soma Networks: It's often difficult for the operators we are in discussions with to separate them or to indicate that one is more important than the other. But we find that most operators are most concerned with a system's performance, and also want a clear path and roadmap to interoperability and certification. In the short-term, operators are most concerned with performance. If they can't roll out networks today that meet or exceed their customers' expectations, then certification doesn't matter. Their end customers only care about a high quality of service, which translates to a high performance network. Also, the number of available profiles for WiMAX Forum certification means that many deployments can't have "certified" equipment for several years. An example is the 700 MHz bands in the US, India, or Taiwan. There is no current-identified certification profile for this frequency. That means at least several years until certification is possible as the WiMAX Forum works through all the other currently-identified profiles. In the longer-term, operators' desires for certification become more important. Certification gives them flexibility and confidence that their networks can continue to grow and integrate new services without being limited to single-vendor solutions as they have been in the past. Certification provides a mechanism to have lower-cost products and additional choices from multiple vendors.
Maravedis: Tell us about your OEM relationships
Soma Networks: The primary relationship that we have publicly discussed is with SANYO Electric Co, which was disclosed back in June of this year. SOMA has actually had a relationship with SANYO for several years prior to the announcement that involved the development of both base stations and mobile devices. By partnering with a large, established consumer electronics device company, the true value of a WiMAX ecosystem can be achieved, both from a manufacturing scale and user-friendly design perspective. As the WiMAX market and technology develops, SOMA will also continue to leverage OEM/ODM relationships to provide full customer solutions.
Maravedis: What is your view on FDD and TDD co-existence? Is this a worry for service providers? Regulators? BIG queston!!
Soma Networks: The debates over FDD vs. TDD will likely continue for many years. It's not unique to WiMAX. From a technology and deployment perspective, it's just not practical to have both TDD and FDD systems in the same location and similar frequencies without significant interference and performance degradation. This is a huge concern for service providers, especially for licensed frequencies, which will be the vast majority of WiMAX deployments. Currently, FDD and TDD systems can really only be deployed using sufficient "guard bands" between them. This means that operators must either give up use of some of the valuable spectrum to use as the guard band, or the regulators must take this into account for their spectrum allocations. In addition, there are existing spectrum allocations that may already mandate a certain technology. For example, the 3.5 GHz spectrum in parts of Europe is ONLY for FDD. It's also our understanding that the recent AWS spectrum allocation in the US mandates FDD. One impact that this has is in the type of WiMAX technology that could be used in those bands. The WiMAX Forum does have some 802.16-2004 FDD certification profiles, but there are no currently identified FDD profiles for 802.16e-2005. That severely limits operator deployment options or forces them into using non-standard, non-certified equipment. Use of 802.16e-2005 allows for the full range of advanced antenna technologies and provides the maximum user experience. SOMA's experience is that many regulators are actually quite open to discussions about the technologies and impacts on their allocations. In some markets, SOMA spends a great deal of time working with regulators to influence spectrum allocation and legislation.
Maravedis: What do you think of the recent changes in the WiMAX forum IPR policies?
Soma Networks: The upcoming proposed changes to the WiMAX Forum's IPR policies are helpful, don't really have much impact for SOMA. SOMA has removed a tremendous amount of IPR uncertainty for our customers by having a licensing agreement with Qualcomm for OFDM technologies. At this point, there are no other WiMAX Forum companies with a similar agreement. As a Principal Member of the Forum, SOMA has the same access to IPR as any other member. The new changes are a partial step in the right direction, but these still don't provide a clear path for the total royalty costs, or for how any such royalty payments might be divided up among Forum members (or other IPR holders) . Simply indicating that licensing will be on a RAND basis doesn't really achieve a clear path. With over 1500 OFDM patents held by over 300 companies, the idea of needing to do separate IPR agreements with each of them is not practical or feasible for any solutions company . In fact, several companies with OFDM IPR claims have already sent out letters to establish their intention of defending and licensing their patents. The biggest concern is that the larger operators may delay deployments until this situation is better understood.
Maravedis: What are the most important challenges facing WiMAX in the next 18 months?
Soma Networks: The best advertising and validation for WiMAX will be the first large operator with a larger-scale deployment. Once that happens, all questions about performance and certification will become secondary. Such proof would also provide a great incentive to the regulators around the world to advance any upcoming spectrum allocations for WiMAX and to alleviate any of their current concerns.
The current uncertainties over IPR are definitely one of the key issues that may limit or delay this first large-scale deployment. While every detail may not be resolved in the next 12 to 18 months, the industry can't continue with this uncertainty and still give operators confidence in deploying WiMAX solutions.
Certification is a key advantage for WiMAX, and it is certainly an important challenge, but the WiMAX Forum has a very good handle on this through its Certification Working Group and the vendor Plugfests. One challenge will be to establish additional profiles and certification timelines to further enable WiMAX deployments.
Another aspect of certification with the WiMAX Forum that doesn't currently get much press is the Network Interoperability Testing (NWIOT). Right now, the certification is focused on the basic wireless connection parameters (spectrum, channel size, antenna processing, etc). NWIOT focuses on the network interconnections between different elements. These are just as critical as the basic connections between the base station and mobile stations. Without full network interoperability, so that important issues such as handoff between base stations, and advanced IMS services will need to be addressed to avoid expensive operator-specific implementations. Further progress on NWIOT will be a big advantage for WiMAX and further reduce deployment costs and uncertainty for operators.
About the Author:
He is member of the Program Advisory Board for the World WiMAX conference since 2004 and a member of the Word Communications Association International, and Broadband Wireless Association. Prior to founding Maravedis, he held various positions at Harris Corporation in charge of market intelligence and business development for several product lines.
