Samsung's master stroke in persuading the WiMAX community to adopt the Korean Wi-Bro technology as the basis of the forthcoming 802.16e mobile standard was to gain global support for a platform in which it had a significant real world headstart. Its western rivals on the infrastructure and handset fronts, accustomed to setting the agenda in mobile communications, now face the prospect of playing catch-up, with Samsung and its compatriot LG the only companies with working products already launched.

This is a gap that its equipment rivals will have to fight hard to close, and the longer we wait for fully certified 802.16e gear, the broader base Samsung and LG will have built up, in their ambitious bid to create a global user base in mobile infrastructure at last. There are other mobile broadband options with a migration path to 802.16e - Navini and NextNet for instance - but these are less close to the standard than Wi-Bro and will have a tougher evolution process, and one with currently uncertain timescales. Other vendors, such as Motorola with Wi4, will create mobile products from scratch and launch them in a relatively short timescale - as little as six months in Motorola's case - even if they are in advance of official WiMAX Forum certification, but they will still face a dangerous market lag behind Samsung.

The Korean giant - together with first mover KT - has advantages and risks, in its early pre-standard moves, that echo those of Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo in 3G. By launching its FOMA network, based on a semi-proprietary, pre-standard version of the UMTS standard, DoCoMo gained a massive headstart inJapan, that is still deeply harmful to other contenders, notably Vodafone Japan. By refusing to wait for finalized standards it gained very early experience of deploying attractive services and of making handsets work effectively, and in the relatively simple environment of a single-vendor system, so that it ironed out many of the teething problems while other operators and their suppliers were still bickering in committees and joining in plugfests.

But it has also faced the need to adapt its network and, critically, its handsets to the full standard, burden not shared by its rivals. This issue was not too serious in the home market, but has become serious as a higher percentage of DoCoMo's high-ARPU subscribers want seamless roaming with 3G networks abroad. The same challenge will face Samsung and its customers, KT and SKT, as WiMAX spreads internationally - within Korea, there will be no urgent need to move from Wi-Bro to full 802.16e, but for international travellers, there will be pressure to undergo a network change around 2008.

Technical profiles for 802.16e:

Of course, that change need not be drastic if 802.16e remains close to Wi-Bro, and Samsung's dual advantage of early market adoption and control of significant intellectual property should ensure it keeps a firm hand on the evolution of the platform. There is a great deal of technical work to be done over the coming months to define the various profiles for 802.16e and which elements should be mandatory in these profiles, and at what stage.

One area where agreement has been reached is smart antennas, with a decision made to support two key antenna processing techniques, MIMO and AAS, individually or in combination. The use of arrays of highly tuned antennas which divide the signalling workload between them is one of the key approaches being taken in the OFDM and 3G worlds to extend range and data rate in wireless.

This is an area where Intel is determined to make its own headstart to push its chips forward in the mobile WiMAX arena. It has put significant investment into antenna specialists and technologies over the past few years and has an important joint development with ArrayComm, which has a cutting edge antenna platform. Initially at the heart of ArrayComm's own iBurst broadband wireless offering, this technology will now be openly licensed and made Wi-MAX compatible.

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Korea Telecom's Wi-Bro

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ArrayComm announced in Beijing that it would release Network MIMO software implementing all antenna processing aspects of the newly approved 802.16e WiMAX profiles. These profiles have been defined by groups of vendors and manufacturers and recommendations were finalized in China, though they still need to be ratified by the WiMAX Forum Technical Working Group and Board.

The recommended architecture incorporates both MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) and AAS (Adaptive Antenna Systems, also known as beamforming). MIMO mainly works to boost subscriber data rates, and AAS improves cell edge link budgets, manages interference and maximizes overall network capacity. Both are already being implemented in Wi-Fi.

"Smart antennas will be as significant in the history of wireless communications as the creation of the cellphone was 30 years ago," said ArrayComm founder and executive chair Martin Cooper (himself credited, while at Motorola, with creating the cellphone). With Samsung firmly in control of the mobile WiMAX agenda, it will be important for chipmakers to excel in key technologies such as smart antennas in order to gain market advantage - and the Koreans' decisions on where to source their chips and how many to manufacture themselves will also have a strong influence on the balance of power in this market.

Accelerated mobile roadmaps:

The playing field can only really start to level out once the certification process is well under way and a wide range of equipment choices becomes available, all interoperable. This makes it essential that the WiMAX Forum accelerates mobile certification and avoids some of the delays and confusion that have surrounded the fixed standard. Otherwise operators that are racing to deploy mobile broadband may have a long period in which the pre-standard option with the most convincing upgrade path to full 802.16e is that of Samsung - an advantage the vendor will exploit to the full, as witnessed by its trials with Sprint Nextel in 2.5GHz in the US, and its first Wi-Bro customer in the Americas, Brazil's TVA Sistema de Televisao (see WiMAX Watch November 14 2005).

Samsung's activities are spurring accelerated efforts by the WiMAX Forum and by individual competitors in handsets and infrastructure, which should only lead to a wider range of choices for operators and downward pressure on prices. The Korean company, working with Korea Telecom, the first carrier officially to announce details of its upcoming Wi-Bro services, demonstrated a Wi-Bro handset and PDA at the recent APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit, putting to shame the timescale estimates of Intel and others, that WiMAX handsets would not be a reality until well into 2007.

Hard on the heels of these demonstrations, Nokia indicated that it would speed up its own development of an 802.16e handset, a critical project for WiMAX that it is undertaking with Intel. This focus on the smartphone reflects the increasing dominance of the Wi- MAX agenda by the large carriers, and shifts the battleground from the laptop-focused roadmap of Intel towards the phone, with its different technical issues and economics.

Samsung says its handsets - the H1000 clamshell/slider model, M8000 PDA, plus a PCMCIA card - will be commercially available in the second quarter of 2006 in Korea and sources within Nokia now expect the Finnish giant to bring forward its own launch by as much as a year, to mid-2007.

This article originally ran in Wireless Watch, a publication of Rethink Research. Reproduced with permission. For information on the weekly Wireless Watch Newsletter and other Rethink Research products and services, click here.