Will WiMax Networks Cost Less to Deploy than 3G?
Lynette Luna of Fierce Wireless has an interview with Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum.
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Pyramid Research and others have come out saying they don’t believe that WiMAX will be cheaper than 3G on the capex front. What is the WiMAX Forum’s perspective?
Resnick: Pyramid’s research is wrong. Honestly, you’re not going to get a vendor to sit down with any firm and walk them through a personal database to determine how they calculate their base station rollout. There are all sorts of different assumptions in the design of a network. You can stack the deck any way you like… One major reduction in capex has to do with handoff. There are two ways to do handoffs: soft handoffs and hard handoffs. That is what is scaring other players to death. WiMAX’s hard handoff model needs less base stations and is a smaller burden on the system. You can space the base stations further apart so it actually costs less.
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A company like Sprint Nextel doesn’t want to subsidize any WiMAX devices when it comes to market. Will we see devices low enough for Sprint to do this? Can the cost curve come down that fast?
Resnick: Companies like Intel can do it because the addition of a WiMAX radio when there is already WiFi in a notebook is a very small incremental cost. It’s essentially the same silicon. The proof is in the pudding. All of these guys have documented and validated that they can get the cost so low that they don’t have to do the subsidy side. We’ve made a good case there with all of the numbers we’ve done, including the IPR costs.
Can WiMAX really get IPR close to zero percent of equipment costs to make equipment significantly cheaper?
Resnick: I think they can get it close to 3 percent to 5 percent. That’s better than 25 percent. We feel confident it will be in that range. We did a study. There are 1550 holders of IPR, and Qualcomm is not the biggest we feel.