more on Imax vs. WiFi: WiFi is the inheritor to Ethernet's Manifest Destiny

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ibd com>
Date: November 23, 2004 11:53:26 AM EST
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Imax vs. WiFi: WiFi is the inheritor to Ethernet's 
Manifest Destiny

I have been involved in these realms for the last 4+ years
both in the hardware manufacturer and service provider realms.
Here is my opinionated, but educated perspective on the
WiMax vs Wi-Fi debate:

At this point in time, WiMax/802.16 is another Zero Billion
Dollar industry. There are no WiMax Products today. There will
be some WiMax products within the next 3 - 6 months, but they
will be first generation and far from the promises that the
WiMax forum has been promising. Wi-Fi/802.11 chipsets are
already up the learning curve by several generations. Wi-Fi
chipsets are already shipping in the high 10's of millions /
year.

IMHO, 802.11 is recapitulating the evolution of Ethernet into
the Wireless realms.

Ethernet was originally considered a "toy" technology by many of
the industry leaders of the time. The manly technologies at that
time were first Token Ring, then 802.12 AnyLAN VG, then ATM.

Wi-Fi is currently considered useful only for the home and some
enterprise applications and a "toy" for outdoor Municipal
Networks.

But Ethernet out evolved and kept delivering just enough
functionality, at much lower cost than the too sophisticated QoS
laden and expensive "heavyweights".

Wi-Fi/802.11 has taken on the mantle of Ethernet's Manifest
Destiny (it uses almost exactly the same packet frame as
Ethernet) and brings it into the wireless realms. There are many
more companies, universities and hackers pushing the boundaries
of what 802.11 can do and the volume is growing at an
accelerating pace.

Today 802.11 is at a similar phase of evolution as early
Ethernet was when there were only a shared contention medium via
hubs and bridges. Ethernet really took off when switches became
available and allowed the contention realm to be broken up to
support parallel data flows. And that is what we can expect in
the next stage of 802.11 evolution. This is what is needed to
make Mesh wireless networks viable with 802.11. There are
already several companies developing mesh (though only a few are
doing it in a way that will scale). There is also an 802.11s
working group developing a standard for wireless mesh. And mesh
is what will allow 802.11 to eventually cover municipal areas.

WiMax hype is extremely misleading. You hear that a WiMax
basestation can create coverage of 35 - 70 miles, deliver 50
Mbps, will work in Unlicensed, Licensed frequencies can deliver
Non Line Of Sight (NLOS) through trees and buildings, will
support mobility and CPE built into Laptops.

But this hype is misleading because they mush together all the
claims for all the different frequencies from 2 GHz to 10 GHz,
licensed and unlicensed, and projections of their roadmap for
the next 8 years.

If you compare WiMax using the same 5.8Ghz Unlicensed
frequencies that 802.11a would use, there may be only 3 or 4 db
link budget advantage of WiMax over 802.11a (i.e. The link
budget is the total of Receiver sensitivity and transmitter
power, less losses between the two end points, thus it
represents the distance that can be covered and/or penetration
thru obstructions. So WiMax can deliver a link budget that is at
most twice as good as 802.11a, and in the scope of things this
is not very much compared to the total link budgets used in
outdoor links).

If you say, ok, lets use licensed spectrum, then you can get
long distances OR NLOS. If you really want to deliver multi MBps
and be able to use laptops inside buildings as CPE, you'll still
need microcell sites on the scale of 1 or 2 mile radius of
coverage and use multiple WATTS of power. WiMax uses
sophisticated base stations and relatively dump CPE. So each
micro-cell basestation would be relatively expensive (compared
to 802.11, but definitely cheaper than cellphone basestations).

AND you would have to buy the spectrum to create the
coverage. At this point in time, in the US, the only spectrum
that has half decent propagation characteristics and is
available for this application in big enough chunks to be useful
is the 2.5Ghz MMDS frequencies. These are already owned by
primarily 3 corporations, plus a bunch of educational
institutions (the later still holding on to it for "educational"
distance learning TV).

So there is a customer base of maybe a handful of companies to
buy and buildout licensed networks. Two of the license owners
failed already in building out an MMDS network, the third is a
"new" company, Clearwire, who bought spectrum from
Worldcom. This does not represent a robust marketplace needed to
drive a rapidly evolving technology. Its more like a legacy
Telco marketplace that will have to compete against DSL and
Cable Modem in the urban/suburban markets that represent the
bulk of the potential end user marketplace. It will not be
subsidized by a parallel home / enterprise networking
marketplace as will 802.11.

Finally, the WiMax industry has (in terms of active, as opposed
to paper members) one giant company, Intel, and scores of small,
mostly barely surviving wireless equipment companies that had
already spent most of their efforts on proprietary LMDS or MMDS
technology and then threw their hats into WiMax as a way to try
to keep going. Most of these companies plan to offer proprietary
enhancements to their WiMax products to "differentiate" from the
competitors.  So there are already way too many companies
involved in WiMax than there will be demand for their
products. So we can expect that when the hype dies down most of
the companies will fail.

Sometime in the near future, I would expect that Intel will drop
out of most activity with WiMax. They will realize that they
need to get back to their "knitting" as AMD is challenging their
core business and that there is never going to be the kind of
volume in WiMax chipsets that is needed to keep Intel's
interest.

There are a few WiMax companies, that will do very well for
themselves. Companies such as Alvarian, who are already a leader
in the outdoor, wide area wireless network equipment even before
WiMax, who understand the market and have the distribution
channel / customer base. This niche will grow with the lower
costs for this style of rural and Multiple Business Unit (MDU)
type network buildouts that can afford the price points that
WiMax will end up with. But it will not be a mass market.

In conclusion, Wi-Fi will out evolve and deliver connectivity at
costs dramatically lower than WiMax. WiMax / 802.16 is just
starting on its path to evolution, has a much smaller base of
innovators and chipset growth volume. Wi-Fi is already far along
on its core learning curve, has an easy order of magnitude
larger base of innovators / investors and chipset growth
volume. WiMax hype will sputter out to reality of a niche
backhaul and rural marketplace, Wi-Fi/802.11 will evolve and
grow into many more realms and dominate the Local Area Network
(LAN) / Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) / Metro Area Network
(MAN).

On 11/23/04 4:04 AM, "David Farber" <dave () farber net> wrote:
> From: "Robert C. Atkinson" <rca53 () columbia edu>
> Date: November 23, 2004 6:24:47 AM EST
> To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: WiMAX vs. Wi-Fi
>
>   Dave:
>
>   From the recent IP posting on the legislation to block municipal 
> Wi-Fi
> in Philadelphia:
>
> "why, exactly, is Philly planning on spending huge piles on Wi-Fi when
> WiMAX could do it cheaper in around the same time frame it'll take them
> to actually deploy?"
>
> Is this true?  Why will WiMAX be cheaper in an urban setting?  When
> will WiMAX really be available?  I think there are some WiMAX skeptics
> that would disagree.  Perhaps a discussion on IP would be illuminating.
>
>   Bob
> --



Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
Voice: 408-882-4755 eFax: +1-408-490-2868
http://www.ibd.com


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