BANGALORE (WiMAX Day). Speaking at the MAIT Wireless World 2007 conference in India last week, Sean Maloney, chief of sales and marketing at Intel, stated that in 2007 Intel will put maximum effort into making WiMAX a global standard, and reducing the costs associated with customer premises equipment (CPE).

The Hindu Times reported that Mr Maloney, in his opening keynote address, predicted that WiMAX CPE prices would decrease from roughly $100 today to $40 by 2008. Lower cost CPE will be driven by a sharp uptake of consumer interest in WiMAX products over the next year.

He further stated that mobile WiMAX would be driven by a plethora of new handheld devices. For consumers, this will include mobile PDAs, entertainment-specific handsets and miniature PCs. More growth may come from industries that use handheld devices that require always-on broadband for use in healthcare, education and government.

Contrary to most prognosticators, Maloney said that fixed and nomadic WiMAX, utilising the 802.16d standards, would be a significantly larger market than mobile WiMAX for the foreseeable future. This is based partly on the fact that new mobile handheld devices will not be available soon, but also that many early adopters of WiMAX will be those consumers who today utilise Wi-Fi on their laptop PCs in the home or office.

Maloney said that WiMAX-enabled laptop computers will quickly enter the market in 2008, and this will drive growth in WiMAX services and will be a driver for further growth in the PC industry.

India’s WiMAX leaders
Also present at the MAIT conference were some of the leading WiMAX professionals in India, discussing the next stage of development for WiMAX in India. Amongst them were A N J Aradhya, General Manager and National Coordinator for Broadband Projects at Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL), India’s leading telecommunications network. BSNL provides fixed line, GSM, and broadband services to some 35 million subscribers.

Aradhya announced at the conference that BSNL plans to provide WiMAX services to over 5,000 villages throughout India. BSNL has already begun to deploy this massive network in Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Pune (for urban WiMAX) and Hissar, Panipat, Rohtak and Pinjore (for rural WiMAX).

The MAIT conference also featured a presentation from Abhay Savargaonkar, vice president of 3G services for Bharti Airtel, who presented his vision of the peaceful co-existence between 3G and WiMAX. Bharti is India’s largest GSM network with 32 million subscribers. The company has offered 3G services for the last two years, and now plans to offer mobile WiMAX.

Savargaonkar noted in his presentation that Bharti would adopt WiMAX simply for the speed it can provide. The company plans to provide its customers with triple-play services in the next few years, and Savargaonkar estimates that these services will require a minimum of 20 Mbit/s download speed. With mobile WiMAX presently able to deliver peak data rates at 46 Mbit/s, it is three times faster than HSDPA and HSPA.

While 3G and WiMAX will compete for investment and consumers, Savargaonkar also noted that the two technologies can co-exist on a network as they are complementary, and provide different services. 3G essentially is an extension of standard mobile voice services, and relies on mobility and ubiquity to drive usage. Whereas the strength of WiMAX as a broadband powerhouse lies in accessing data, such as web browsing, content downloads, gaming, and other data-heavy services not well-suited for circuit-switched technology.