Motorola bus tour brings some good news for WiMAX

By Jacqueline Emigh | Published April 8, 2008, 5:06 PM

A live demo of mobile WiMAX was successfully presented by Motorola at a sold out trade show in Singapore this week, not long after it announced completion of a successful trial of the technology in Thailand.

Show-goers taking a bus tour at the WiMAX Forum Congress Asia reportedly experienced Web browsing, video conferencing, and other wireless applications while moving past Motorola 400 access points (APs) along the route, with mobile hand-off between the APs. Motorola provided backhaul to its facility in Singapore over its wireless IP equipment.

Meanwhile, at the end of March, Motorola announced completion of a mobile WiMAX trial, conducted in Thailand with partner UIH under government permission, to help assess WiMAX as a way of boosting Internet penetration rate that currently stands at only 15% in Thailand.

According to a recent analyst report by Ovum, although some countries in the Asia Pacific are simply looking for a way to bridge the "digital divide," governments in certain other areas, including South Korean and Taiwan, also see involvement with new wireless technology as a possible boost to their domestic exports business.

But not all WiMAX users in the region have turned out that happy. At the end of March, Buzz Broadband CEO Buzz Broadband CEO Garth Freeman stunned an international WiMAX conference in Thailand with complaints about network delays and jitter on VoIP and other Internet applications, along with poor wireless coverage range for the 3.5 GHz WiMAX link both indoors and in non-line-of-sight outdoor transmissions.

In response, Airspan, the Australian ISP's partner in WiMAX, maintained that Buzz could have avoided the coverage range problems by choosing more costly macro-cell devices instead of cheaper micro-cell units, and that quality of service (QoS) issues could have been resolved if Buzz had accepted Airspan's invitation to pay for an independent QoS analysis.

Yet the recent Ovum report also predicts that both mobile and fixed WiMAX will remain niche technologies for at least five years.

Nathan Burley, an Ovum analyst, blamed absence of standardization -- particularly the lack of a universally recognized spectrum for mobile WiMAX -- as a big factor behind the delays in widescale deployments.