Date:23/03/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/03/23/stories/2008032355261300.htm

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WiMAX wind blowing the lay user’s way

Anand Parthasarathy

Players eyeing unlicensed spectrum to unleash broadband WiMAX for consumers

— Photo: Anand Parthasarathy

Betting on broadband: Alcatel-Lucent engineer G.P.Singh points to the plug-in device that allows laptops to harness the broadband speeds of the nearest WiMax network. The technology was showcased at the Convergence India exhibition in Delhi on Friday.

New Delhi: WiFi — that’s for the aam janatha. WiMAX is affordable mostly to well-heeled — mostly corporate — customers. That was how things seemed to be, till now. But IT’s all changing fast.

If there was one message wafting down the cool halls of Delhi’s Pragati Maidan for the three days of the Convergence India show last week, it was this: the superior broadband speeds of WiMAX and third generation (3G) mobile phone services may soon become affordable to lay users — and a clutch of technologies on display showed how this was going to happen.

Zippy speeds

Crowds gathered at the Alcatel-Lucent stand to experience the zippy speeds of WiMAX — allowing them to stream smooth video footage, browse the Internet, carry on a video phone conversation with someone on another continent — all at the same time, around five million bits per second.

Making it happen was a matchbox-sized plug-in card that fitted into what is called the PCMCIA slot of a laptop computer.

It was visible proof that superior WiMAX speeds could be experienced today on any laptop with hardware not much different from the wireless data cards now offered by all leading Indian mobile providers.

In the unspoken competition between WiMax and 3G, as competing technologies for the title of “Broadband Badshah,” companies like Alcatel do not take sides: “We are technology neutral,” says its India president Vivek Mohan, “Our job is to help telecom providers migrate their services to broadband, taking whatever route they choose.”

‘Stealthy entry’

Which is good for the rest of us because while 3G mobile depends on untethering by government through licences for a few fixed bands, WiMAX seems set to stage a ‘stealthy’ entry into and around the 5 MHz band, using ‘unlicensed’ bands, just as WiFi operates today.

If enough manufacturers are smart enough to make it happen in this tiny ‘free’ space of the spectrum, lay users who today need no one’s permission to operate a WiFi home network can look forward to an equally free WiMAX network that could be 10 times faster than WiFi as we now experience it and reach 400 times further.

Aperto and Airspan were wooing service providers at the Convergence India event, with hardware-software combos that allowed them to create such licence-exempt WiMAX “clouds.”

Let’s hope that the garam hawa of WiMAX blows one of these clouds down our way — and soon!