WiMAX is now an official 3G standard (Was it not 4G?)

Last Thursday evening, the UN agency ITU in Geneva officially admitted WiMax into the IMT-2000 family, which includes the dominant 3G technologies CDMA-2000, W-CDMA and TD-SCDMA. This is the first new addition since MT-2000 was approved in 1999.

"To have WiMax approved as an IMT-2000 technology is a huge win for the WiMax Forum," said Ron Resnick, president of the WiMax Forum, the industry group that certifies interoperability of products using the technology.

Interesting analysis from Ovum report:

In addition to a significant gain in credibility for mobile WiMAX, the main impact of the ITU decision concerns the European market where one of the main barriers for mobile WiMAX adoption was the lack of spectrum availability in the 2.5GHz band. In Europe, it was initially decided that the 2.5-2.690GHz bands would be considered as being IMT-2000 extension bands, or more simply, UMTS/HSPA bands. Of course

WiMAX backers considered this to be unfair and adopted two strategies in order to address this situation:

• At a European level, they pushed for the adoption of a 'technology neutral' policy
• They have encouraged mobile WiMAX to be seen as an IMT-2000 technology.

Even if the concept of 'technology neutral' policy for spectrum is going ahead as shown by the allocation rules adopted for 2.5-2.690GHz spectrum in the UK and in Norway, the adoption of 16e as an IMT-2000 standard immediately makes the technology eligible for deployment in the 3G spectrum.

Theoretically, as a member of the IMT-2000 family of technologies, mobile WiMAX can be deployed by mobile operators using their current 3G spectrum. However, there is almost no chance to see existing mobile operators deploying 16e in their 3G spectrum. There are two key reasons for this:

• Mobile WiMAX profiles for 1.9-2.1GHz bands have not been defined. Given that the WiMAX Forum is already struggling with the certification process for wave1 products in 2.3GHz / 2.5GHz / 3.5GHz bands, there is no chance to see any additional profiles being defined in a near future.
• To be efficient, the WiMAX Forum suggests operators have access to at least 20MHz, though 30MHz is considered to be far better. Mobile WiMAX only supports TDD and, as of today, 3G operators in Western Europe own 5MHz TDD spectrum on average.

Considering that the current 3G spectrum will not be used for mobile WiMAX in Europe, the only opportunities for operators to deploy this technology are currently in higher frequencies. However, in order to offer mobility, the lower the spectrum band, the better the propagation and associated economics. Operators with mobile WiMAX ambitions will focus on the 2500-2690MHz IMT-2000 band.

Furthermore, this decision further increases the potential economies of scale for mobile WiMAX in the 2.5GHz band worldwide after Sprint and Clearwire's selection of 16e for their nationwide plans in the US.

However, despite Sprint's marketing, this announcement also means that mobile WiMAX is a 3G technology like UMTS/HSPA or EV-DO and not 4G as it has previously been marketed by some players in the industry. The candidate for 4G, or now IMT-Advanced, will be the 802.16m standard which is expected to be backwards compatible with 16e.

NOTE: What the standards body actually voted to support was OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing), which forms the basis of WiMax today but is also set to power future technologies, including LTE (Long-Term Evolution), a system now under development as the next step in the GSM migration path. Commercial LTE deployment is expected in 2009 or 2010.

What this means is technically, ITU didn't accept WiMAX (802.16d/802.16e) per say as 3G standard. What they have done is, accepted "IMT-2000 OFDMA TDD WMAN specification" as 3G standard which in normal terms reffered as 802.16. Put another way, the ITU didn't accept WiMAX, It accepted WMAN. As per the definition of WiMAX forum "WiMAX based upon the harmonized IEEE 802.16/ETSI HiperMAN standard". One more point, ITU approaved 802.16 as a Time Division Duplex (TDD) but not for use in Frequency Division Duplex (FDD). Most of the licensed frequencies are based of FDD. [from Amandeep Singh's post if forum oxford]

Background:

The Mobile WiMax system profile was standardized in February 2006. According to several industry sources, the key features of Mobile Wimax are that it uses OFDMA, MIMO, Beam-forming and a number of other recent technology advancements that are labeled as features in 3.9G [LTE]. As a result, Wimax has some key advantages in comparison to other 3Gs, which were set up 7 years ago. It supports several new features necessary for delivering mobile broadband services at vehicular speeds greater than 120 km/hr1 with QoS. Some of Wimax’s key new features and benefits include:

• Introduces OFDMA, which improves spectrum efficiency (the amount byte transferred on given width of frequency) around two times more than current 3G technologies or Wi-Fi. For the same service, Wimax only need about half of the base station as would for HSPA or EVDO –RevB.
• Enables a wide range of advanced antenna systems including MIMO, beam-forming, space-time coding and spatial multiplexing. It thus increases the covering range of Wimax; it also can dynamically allocate frequency band (from 1.5 to 20 MHz) based on user’s signal strength, bandwidth requirement. It thus makes better use of available frequency to support more users.
• Dynamic Power Conservation Management ensures power-efficient operation of battery-operated mobile handheld and portable devices in Sleep and Idle modes. Which may be critical for small devices like cell phones.
• With 5 millisecond latency between hand-hold device and cellular tower, plus the support of QoS, make Wimax good for high quality VOIP, this wireless data network also competes with 2G and 3G on voice service. This is the reason why Qualcomm and Ericsson are strongly against it.
• Wimax is an open standard, which means there will be no or very little royalty (Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chipmaker, now charges patent royalties approaching 5% of the price of a 3G handset). This is one of the biggest advantages of Wimax.
• Another key feature of Wimax is that it defines a Framework or APIs and leave implement details to individual company. It thus makes it possible to plug in those most recent progresses and keep itself up-to-date, and this also encourage competition to develop better system.