4G Is Just One Piece of the Mobile Broadband IP Puzzle

While proponents of WiMAX and LTE see the future as a disruptive world of ubiquitous, broadband mobile connectivity enabled by 4G, there’s a bigger picture to consider: the creation of a single, multi-access IP network, which will knit together all kinds of access methods, from 4G to DSL.

In some ways it’s the IMS dream (again) of an access-agnostic core wherein the applications are abstracted from the network layer, using SIP to seamlessly traverse multiple types of transport and access networks.

“We're trying to connect people to the apps and services that they want access to,” said John Hindle, director of mobile service provider marketing at Cisco Systems Inc., which bought WiMAX vendor Navini Networks last October. “They’ll get there not just with WiMAX or LTE — it could be fixed Ethernet, DSL, cable, etc. As a human being, you’re not making a conscious choice as to which access network to use. You’re focused on cool devices and applications, and you just want them to work.”

4G Mobile Broadband

That kind of fixed-mobile convergence is not just a nice-to-have; there are pragmatic rationales at work as well. The industry as a whole has accepted the fact that networks of any sort, fixed or mobile, are moving to IP, and endpoints are increasingly IP-capable. Eventually, that will give operators the opportunity to collapse multiple networks onto a common infrastructure (IMS or otherwise), which is a positive from an opex standpoint because that translates to one management view and set of support systems. (See xchange’s June cover story, “Leading Telecom Technologists Join Forces to Get a Handle on Convergence,” for more on industry efforts to collapse networks and deliver converged services.)

It also makes interconnection with other service provider networks that much easier, which becomes important as a revenue dimension. “People are writing very creative applications,” explained Hindle. “If we can accelerate applications across networks and do revenue sharing between operators, that’s a good way to accelerate revenue growth. Such a collaborative model is crucial to the industry, between both peers and even competitors.”

The new Clearwire’s relationship with the cablecos offers a view toward the beginnings of this vision. The cable industry’s DOCSIS standard provided WiMAX with its initial medium access control (MAC), which allows nodes to talk to each other; and WiMAX and DOCSIS look the same at Layer 2. That means that running applications seamlessly across WiMAX and cable landline networks is not only possible, but almost a no-brainer. And that means integrated services can be rolled out more easily for the quad play as well as business applications.

“As we move away from very disjointed networks to more of a flat IP architecture, we see incumbent operators and telcos moving to an IPTV solution and MSOs integrating the quad play with WIMAX,” said Michael Seymour, vice president of Alcatel-Lucent's North American broadband wireless unit. “Integrated services and more seamless inside/outside coverage is really going to drive new models.”

Similarly, collaboration between LTE and WiMAX, and even Wi-Fi, is not too far-fetched. Wavesat, a semiconductor company, in May introduced a family of multimodal chipsets that combine WiMAX, Wi-Fi and future migration to LTE once that standard is finally gelled. Motorola Inc. is working on the same thing.

The network side allows collaboration too. “If you look out a few years, you’ll see that we will have two different competing technologies,” said Fred Wright, senior vice president for cellular networks and WiMAX at Motorola. “But the performance on the uplink and the downlink are similar, both use OFDM, and there’s an immense amount of commonality between the two. We estimate 65, 70, 80 percent reuse between the two, including the smart antennae, hardware platform and some of the software.”

The upshot of all of this? Happier end users and profitable operators. “Our [service provider] customers see it as a broader picture than 2G, 3G, 4G and wired,” said Cisco’s Hindle. “Mobility is less of a technology choice and becomes just a fundamental characteristic of the network. It's what we do, we move. It’s not about, ‘Will I have WiMAX?’ It’s about, ‘How do I build a business here?’ At the end of the day, the network exists to make money. How do we do that?”

The answer, he said, lies in speeding the innovation of integrated services. “People just want a cool mobile/home phone that lets them get football clips, no matter where they are,” he noted. “The service provider that can say ‘Don't worry about it, we'll get it to you and make it nice for you, and you don’t have to worry about anything” is the one who wins.”

For more on this, read the July cover story, “Sprint-Clearwire Rides Again, LTE Makes Inroads.”

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