WiMax versus HSDPA

Martyn Roetter BMI-T Navigator | 16 August, 2009

So far HSPA is far more successful than WiMax, something which is overlkooked in the WiMax versus LTE rivalry

In Korea, WiMAX (known locally as WiBro (Wireless Broadband)) received strong support from the Government, including marching orders for industry in the typical Korean approach that led to its early commercial deployment. Yet WiMAX networks have only garnered a small market share in competition with HSPA-based services.

As of the end of June, 2009 of the two WiBro operators KT (Korea Telecom, the now privatized incumbent) claimed to have 218,454 WiBro subscribers. The larger mobile operator SK Telecom (SKT) does not publish its WiBro subscriber numbers separately, but one estimate of this number as of April 2009 was just 20,000, although the company has a target of 100,000 by the end of the year. In contrast, also as of the end of June, Korea counted almost 22 million HSPA subscribers, about 47% of the total mobile subscriber base.

While the circumstances in Korea are special and in some respects unique, the Korean experience does not bode well for the prospects of WiMAX elsewhere, given that Korea was a pioneer in developing, deploying, and favoring this technology.

Korean policy makers and vendors sought to avoid having to repeat the experience of paying large license fees to Qualcomm for the latter’s CDMA technology, which it had selected for Korea’s 2G networks instead of GSM, by introducing a new technology for which they owned significant intellectual property.

Limited coverage of WiBro in Korea compared to HSPA has been and is one obstacle to the former’s success. Other obstacles likely include a relative paucity of terminals and a much less rich portfolio of capabilities than the alternative 3GPP community which is on an HSPA/LTE roadmap can offer.

Whether or not WiBro/WiMAX has been able to offer superior performance (transmission speeds) than HSPA in some situations, evidently any superiority has been woefully insufficient to overcome the other disadvantages and limitations of WiMAX-based services.

For some time, at least 18 months, it has been obvious that HSPA was being much more successful than WiBro/WiMAX in Korea. This fact that has been overlooked too frequently in the attention being paid to the 4G rivalry between WiMAX and LTE, as WiMAX tries to portray itself as a step beyond 3G technologies such as HSPA.

Source: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Telecoms/9214.html

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