Alvarion says, 2010 is the year of WiMAX

Alvarion says, 2010 is the year of WiMAX
Ben Uzor Jr
With the endless availability of information and a degree of uncertainty in terms of where the worldwide economy is headed, Alvarion, a global provider of WiMax solutions with the most extensive customer base and over 250 commercial deployments around the globe, has predicted that 2010 will be the year of WiMAX (Worldwide Inter-operability for Microwave Access). According to the WiMAX Equipment, Devices and Subscribers forecast report by Infonetics Research, the number of global WiMAX subscribers is expected to grow from 4 million at present to 130 million subscribers by 2013. Nearly every developing country currently has a WiMAX network and this demand for wireless Internet access is expected to exponentially increase in the future. Daniel Levy, general manager, Africa and Middle East at Alvarion pointed out that there are already over 475 WiMAX networks deployed to date in 140 countries worldwide and although the numbers are debatable, there is no doubt that substantial growth and network expansion is taking off at very fast pace. “In addition to an increase in the number of networks traced by WiMAX, many of the already established WiMAX networks in Africa continue to rapidly expand.” According to him, WiMAX deployment and expansion will not ignore Africa because its popularity globally is matched by major momentum taking off in developing countries who are currently struggling to gain wireless internet capabilities. “Though poor infrastructure, insufficient resources, lack of knowledge and financial instability are major problems facing, developing countries, WiMAX has proven to be the best means of providing wireless Internet at broadband speeds – and looking ahead at the ways in which WiMAX will benefit additional countries in the future is a hopeful and exciting prospect”, Levy further added. Industry watchers expect to see variety of WiMAX enabled devices in 2010 as a result of the maturing vendor ecosystem and the activities telecom networks. In addition, the increase of WiMAX subscribers and larger build outs by operators would mean further declines in WiMAX CPE prices. On the infrastructure side, another area of expected change is the increased use of beam forming technology complimenting MIMO in WiMAX base stations to reduce total network cost and increase performance. Until recently, the traditional thinking was that WiMAX base stations using beam forming was too expensive. While it is true that a beamforming base station adds more to the cost of equipment, beamforming can also significantly increase the throughput under certain conditions.