WiMAX hype set expectations too high, Seybold tells audience

SAN FRANCISCO — Don’t believe the hype.
That was Andrew Seybold’s message about WiMAX as Sprint Nextel Corp. and Clearwire Corp. plan to roll out the new technology in select cities this fall.
Officials from the CDMA Development Group and 3G Americas also said WiMAX and LTE have no future together when it comes to combining the two technologies on chips. Seybold discussed WiMAX and other new technologies during his Wireless University seminar on the eve of the start of CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2008 in San Francisco.
Close to 100 attendees listened to Seybold’s take on the future of the wireless field on Tuesday.
“As a technology, WiMAX is not bad,” Seybold said. “It is the hype surrounding WiMAX.”
Seybold said part of the hype is being built by Sprint Nextel in its claim that the broadband technology is four times faster than 3G at one-tenth of the cost. Seybold said he is skeptical of the claim because the companies have not shared any real-world test results.
‘They can’t prove it,” Seybold said.
Seybold also said WiMAX is not a 4G technology and has been classified as a 3G technology. He also noted the merger by Sprint and Clearwire has yet to be completed, and Clearwire is losing money.
WiMAX has been highly scrutinized ever since Sprint Nextel announced the technology, and later delayed the launch of the service. Sprint Nextel has now announced service would be launched in Baltimore this month. The company plans to add Chicago and Washington D.C., in the fourth quarter. The company is touting that a range of devices including laptops, mobile Internet devices, media players, cameras and navigation would be able to use the technology.
Seybold questioned whether Sprint, Clearwire, Intel Corp. and the cable companies interested in the technology can build a WiMAX system that can make money. He said the technology will face stiff competition by going against cable and DSL broadband services.When it goes mobile, WiMAX will compete against incumbent wide area networks.
For WiMAX to succeed there needs to be millions of customers to drive device prices down, Seybold said.
Seybold said for Sprint to cover 75% of the United States with WiMAX, about 65,000 cell sites would have to be built at 2.5 GHz. Only 22,000 cell sites would be needed to build out the same coverage using 700 MHz.
As WiMAX is expected to hit the market in limited cities, the development of LTE also continues.
“LTE looks like the path of the future,” Seybold said.
Vicki Livingston, 3G Americas’ director of marketing, said LTE deployments are expected to start in phases in 2011 and 2012. By 2015, Livingston said there will be a large volume of subscribers.
Livingston and Joe Lawrence, CDMA VP of marketing, said chipmakers should stay away from combining LTE and WiMAX.
“It doesn’t make sense to slow down the development of LTE to include WiMAX,” Livingston said.
Lawrence said he doubts there will be LTE coverage for devices with WiMAX technology.
Seybold said WiMAX is great for Third World countries and can find a place in the industry to serve rural areas. He just questioned if it can be a widely used network.
“It will depend on what it does,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with the technology, but expectations were set. I’m picking on all of the hype surrounding WiMAX.”
Sprint Nextel and Clearwire own a majority of the spectrum for WiMAX in the United States. Once the merger between the two companies is approved, $3.2 million in investments are expected from Intel, Google Inc., Time Warner Cable, Comcast Corp. and Bright House Networks.