Huff … Puff … once again trying to play catch-up …
Carnival of the Mobilists #120 is hosted by Skydeck. Click here to access the link.
Carnival of the Mobilists #121 is brought to you by 3lib. You can get to it here.
And finally, the Carnival of the Mobilists #122 comes to you from Xellular Identity here.
The IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Santa Clara Valley Society organized its annual Short Course titled “WiMAX: Opportunities, Challenges and Concepts”, on Saturday 19 April 2008 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Auditorium.
Here are some of the highlights from the sessions:
Dr. Mohammed Sayed set the ball rolling with an introduction to the Workshop.
Delivering the keynote address titled, “WiMAX Technology Infrastructure Overview”, Intel Fellow Dr.Siavash Alamouti made an interesting case in favor of WiMAX over even LTE.
- The next killer app: “anything that internet can provide and more”
- If the future is all about mobile internet and ubiquitous access, then it is not about phones but about PCs that can
provide a better experience to the user.
- The walled gardens have lead to the failure of 3G.
- The cell-phone world’s approach to providing high-speed data access just does not scale.
- WiMAX has the potential to deliver, lives up to its hype.
- Intel is forging ahead with its MID plans with WiFi/WiMAX chipsets.
- The industry is finally moving away from TDMA/CDMA to OFDM + MIMO.
- Comparing WiMAX and LTE: even though both end up in IP, one would go through more layers and
proprietary protocols in case of the LTE.
Dr. Mohammed Shakouri of Alvarion, also the Chair of Marketing Working Group, WiMAX Forum spoke on the WiMAX Industry Trends. He gave a succinct snapshot of the current WiMAX scenario worldwide.
- The WiMAX Forum now has about 530 members and that there are about 281 service providers currently working
across the globe to deliver WiMAX services.
- About 133 Million WiMAX users by 2013 (which is a higher number than the 80 Million in a previous post of mine)
- With its internet business model with mobility, currently 3G and WiMAX can peacefully coexist.
- But, will LTE and WiMAX coexist?
Presenting the business case for WiMAX, Doug Gray, a consultant to the WiMAX Forum covered aspects of deployment, estimating capacity requirements, CAPEX breakdowns and the sensitivity analysis with examples.
- The spectrum licensing costs are actually a tiny fraction of the big picture.
- Mobile WiMAX offers a base station solution at a low cost per Megabit.
- It supports multiple usage models with multiple applications.
- Mobile WiMAX significantly reduces the base station requirements in regions with high subscriber density.
- On a per customer basis, the infrastructure cost would rise by more than $500 for a ‘greenfield’ operator instead
of say, Sprint.
This was followed by a panel which was asked to provide their views on “WiMAX in 2013″.
- Dr.Shakouri: flat rates would be most common five years from now
- Tom Tofigh disagreed. He felt that flat rates would work for some while others would be willing to pay premium rates
for customized services. He also called for seamless applications to work across different networks and devices.
- Phil Lorch of Agilent was convinced that WiMAX has disruptive capability since it was built from grassroots.
The second half of the day was kicked off by Dr Raymond Pengelly of Cree Wireless Devices who spoke about the potential of GaN Transistors for amplifiers in WiMAX base stations.
This was followed by Tom Tofigh who chairs the WiMAX Forum Application Working Group, who spoke on “An Open Architecture for Application Deployment over WiMAX”. An end to end solution for WiMAX applications would work, with open platforms, open devices giving rise to interesting aspects such as role of QoE (Quality of Experience), multiple service classes, etc. A lot of very interesting opportunities are coming up to tap into the potential of moving from networking of networks to service based networks. I found his talk very engaging and well-researched.
David Huynh of Agilent wrapped it up with an introduction to the WiMAX Wave 2 testing, MIMO and Space Time Coding and a demo of the Agilent products/capabilities to testing WiMAX systems. In summary, it was a very well organized, informative and interactive day on a very hot topic. The setting provided for a number of interesting conversations which will lead me to more blog posts on related topics. Stay tuned. You can find details of the event, download presentations and check out the photos from the website of IEEE MTT Santa Clara Valley Society.
I would like to thank Dr. Mohammed Sayed for inviting me to this workshop. The event was sponsored by Agilent, Applied Wave Research, Computer Simulation Technology, MC Microwave, Rohde & Schwarz and Zeland Software.
Way to go. Engadget has an eye-catching note about Samsung and the possibility of a water-power cellphone from them by 2010. That would really be interesting. Any startups thinking on similar lines? Let me know. In the meantime, Samsung released their first HSUPA handset for the South Korea Telecom’s network with 2Mb/s upload and up to 7.2 Mb/s download.
The IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Santa Clara Valley Society organized an event on Saturday April 19, 2008 titled “Short Course: WiMAX Opportunities, Challenges, and Concepts”. I had a very interesting day and will post the details about this event soon. Details of the event and pictures are here.
The Carnival of the Mobilists #117 is on mobilestance.com - a blog started in 2007 by Jamie Wells, mobilestance.com is a resource for those following the movements, trends and key happenings in the mobile marketing industry.
Click here for the Carnival of the Mobilists #118. Paul Ruppert is hosting it on Mobile Point View. The over-arching theme of CTIA is clear.
Debi Jones is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists #119 on her site mobilejones.
Here are some of the upcoming events that I will be attending. If you are going to be at this event, let’s meet:
In his work, “Manuel Castells, Open Source, Technology of Cooperation“, Howard Rheingold said:
When social communication media grow in capability, pace, scope, or scale, people use these media to construct more complex social arrangements—that is, they use communication tools and techniques to increase their capacity to cooperate at larger and larger scales. Human history is a story of the co-evolution of tools and social practices to support ever more complex forms of cooperative society.
The Economist is carrying a special report on the social consequences of the mobile communication revolution across the planet.
It sets the context with the following words:
As a word, vision and goal, modern urban nomadism has had the mixed blessing of a premature debut. In the 1960s and 70s Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the most influential media and communications theorist ever, pictured nomads zipping around at great speed, using facilities on the road and all but dispensing with their homes. In the 1980s Jacques Attali, a French economist who was advising president François Mitterrand at the time, used the term to predict an age when rich and uprooted elites would jet around the world in search of fun and opportunity, and poor but equally uprooted workers would migrate in search of a living. In the 1990s Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners jointly wrote the first book with “digital nomad” in the title, adding the bewildering possibilities of the latest gadgets to the vision.
A few interesting nuggets that I gleaned are:
In spite of some dire predictions, I am optimistic that something good can still come out of all this. Before that, may be we will go through paying more and more attention to less and less.
Here are the links:
Our nomadic future
Prepare to see less of your office, more of your family—and still perhaps be unhappy
Nomads at last
Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other, says Andreas Kluth
Labour movement
The joys and drawbacks of being able to work from anywhere
The new oases
Nomadism changes buildings, cities and traffic
Location, location, location
It matters
Family ties
Kith and kin get closer, with consequences for strangers
A world of witnesses
When everybody becomes a nomadic monitor
Homo mobilis
As language goes, so does thought
Author interview
A discussion with Andreas Kluth, Bay Area technology correspondent of The Economist
Need to play catch up … took an unplanned blogging break due to heavy workload. I apologize to those who missed me. Lot of exciting things have been happening. Let’s start …
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