I spent most of last week visiting a Cisco WiMAX customer in the Caribbean island of Curacao. Scarlet BV offers a wireless broadband service in the Nederland Antilles islands, some of the most southerly islands in the Caribbean Sea.
Curacao is the biggest of the 4 islands that make up the Nederland Antilles, still owned and governed by Holland, although with a large degree of autonomy. The population of about 130,000 is made up of 50,000 Dutch, with the rest coming from all over. The island is…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on June 22, 2009 at 10:00am —
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Well, Amsterdam is for all kinds for things. One of them is WIMAX, where the WiMAX Forum, through it's partner, Informa, holds it's annual Global Congress.
It was downsized somewhat from last year, I would say about 30%. The booths were empty, because unlike other shows, Informa held seminar tracks concurrently with the exhibit hours, and most attendees decided to attend the sessions. I did have some very good conversations, and my company did actually close a multi-country deal at the show (ca…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on June 9, 2009 at 6:17pm —
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I won't replicate the whole darn press release here, but you can see the whole text at the link below:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/prod_051309b.html
KIRKLAND, Wash., and SAN JOSE, Calif., May 13, 2009 – Clearwire Corporation (NASDAQ: CLWR) and Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced today an alliance designed to enhance and expand CLEARTM 4G mobile WiMAX services throughout the United States. Under terms of the agreement, Clearwire has selected Cisco as its national Internet Protocol Next-Ge…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on May 14, 2009 at 10:03am —
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So it doesn't cause cancer (at least according to most reputable scientists), but cellular systems are suspected of being the root cause behind another strange phenomenon, the disappearance of the honey bee.
University of Iowa Agricultural College in Des Moines has been studying honey bees ability to distinguish the routes used to find a food source, in this case, a tree in bloom, or a field of flowing crops. Bees normally remember their route, and can communicate it to other bees through a ser…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on April 1, 2009 at 3:00pm —
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http://blog.medting.com/2009/02/20/medting-at-mwc-2009-with-intel-and-cisco/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh1oe-NJ3Vs
http://blogs.cisco.com/sp/comments/mobile_world_congress_2009_4g_today_-_wimax_demo/
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Added by Paul Sergeant on March 11, 2009 at 9:02am —
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IP or Internet Protocol has always been chaotic – it was born that way. Created in the 1970’s by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, it consisted of two essential parts, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP). Over time it evolved and added new features and functionality, the current iteration is IP version 6.
Applications can communicate in one of two primary ways. They either invoke the TCP layer through an intermediary layer called “ports”, or invoke the IP layer directly through…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on March 10, 2009 at 12:52pm —
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I heard today that RCR (I have never known what that stood for!) closed it's doors. I knew many of the people there because over my years of working in the wireless industry, I have met and briefed most of them many times. And now, like newspaper dailies, they have fallen victim to the recession and the Internet.
The recession I have no responsibility for. I did not buy a house I couldn't afford, wallow in credit card debt, or package unsustainable loans for others. Fortunately my employer has…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on March 4, 2009 at 11:04am —
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Not a post mortum, because no one died.......
MWC 2009 has been and is now gone. The girl got the hero, the lions ate the trainer, and the witch moved to Greenland.
For a bankrupt company, Nortel had a large booth, but it looked pretty empty when I walked by. Ericsson looked pretty busy, as did Alcatel Lucent, But I was only in the main hall for a few minutes on Wednesday, so that is only a snap shot impression.
As expected, a lot of cool new MID (Mobile Internet Devices) on display, I saw a…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on February 19, 2009 at 10:29am —
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In my last post, I discussed the benefits of Advanced Antenna Subsystem (AAS) techniques and the RF advances they enable – MIMO, Beamforming, and MIMO+BF in terms of technology. Now I’d like to look at the same technologies, but from the standpoint of service provider economics and the SP business case.
MIMO alone
MIMO-A (space time coding) is for robustness while mobile, in a fading environment. The base station sends all the same data twice, once from each antenna. Doubling up…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on January 29, 2009 at 12:00pm —
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February is MWC month, and an all expenses paid trip to Barcelona, pickpocket capital of the world after Florence, Italy (a.k.a. Firenza). I will be there, working 9 to 9 every day. Here's what I expect:
1) LTE everywhere! Not products, but prototypes
2) Smaller crowds, fewer booths - the recession bites
3) A valiant effort from WiMAX to steal a share of the Mobile Internet spotlight
4) An equally valiant effort from Ericsson and the GSMA to get it back.......
and finally from Alcatel-Lucent "…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on January 22, 2009 at 2:30pm —
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There is a lot of disinformation being spread in the WiMAX community about my subject of today, beamforming, and about other advanced RF technologies such as MIMO. Some vendors try to portray them as opposite, competing technologies. I see them as complementary. Someone has to set the record straight…..
The WiMAX Forum identified and standardized two “Advanced Antenna System” (AAS) technologies, and included them in the so-called “Wave 2” profiles for Mobile WiMAX. These were MIMO (Multiple Inp…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on January 12, 2009 at 10:25am —
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Ahead of LTE, AT&T tests 7.2 Mbps speeds in Chicago
Wireless provider sets sights on HSPA+
December 18 2008 - 2:13 pm ET | Allie Winter | RCR Wireless News
AT&T Mobility is in no hurry to transition to Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. In response to accelerated next-generation rollout schedules by Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility spokesman Mark Siegel said the carrier has plenty of room for upgrades before making the switch to LTE.
“We have some real adv…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on December 18, 2008 at 3:29pm —
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LTE (Long Term Evolution) has been in the news a lot recently. “We expect that LTE will actually be in service somewhere here in the U.S. probably this time next year,” said Dick Lynch, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Verizon Communications.
Dick is being extremely aggressive, but I will bet that Verizon will find a way to have at least a small market trial of LTE somewhere in the USA. After all, I saw it “working” a year ago at MWC 2008. This does not mean it will be r…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on December 15, 2008 at 4:05pm —
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Well, the title of this entry is a bit ingenious, because obviously WiMAX is a lot more than just the RF. But I thought it a sufficiently interesting subject to worth discussion.
Moving from the radio to the core, the first wired networking component is the Access Services Network, or ASN. The ASN is defined by the WiMAX Forum’s Network Working group, which developed a reference architecture complete with defined functionality and interfaces.
The primary ASN component is the ASN Gateway, often…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on December 10, 2008 at 3:00pm —
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There are a few small scale deployments of WiMAX already in Latin America, but spectrum remains an issue, especially in the biggest country in South America, Brasil ("Brazil" to English speakers).
I just spent much of this week south of the equator in Rio de Janeiro, by the famous beach, where it is now late spring. Don't feel sorry for me.......
But I was there to work, not play, at the WiMAX Forum's Latin America Congress. The spectrum regulator, Anatel, is struggling with how to release the…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on December 5, 2008 at 3:41pm —
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Ok, so the real subject is being certified. As in "certified by the WiMAX Forum", or at least, its surrogate, AT4. Certification is going to be a must, but not for the reason that most people think.
The actual certification test, which is performed using a document issued the WiMAX Forum's Certification Working Group (or GWG), tests interoperability between a base station, and a different vendor's subscriber modem or CPE device, and then repeats the same tests with another CPE from another vend…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on November 12, 2008 at 6:33pm —
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Today I saw a press release from Alvarion, claiming that their customer, Digital Bridge, was the first to launch a Mobile WiMAX service in the USA (in June 2008). The same claim was repeated at WiMAX World in Chicago in early October. A few weeks ago I saw stories in the press claiming that Xohm's service in Baltimore was first.
All are incorrect. The first Mobile WiMAX service in the USA was launched in Springfield Illinois in March 2008, by Xanadoo, using network equipment from Cisco. Xanadoo…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on November 11, 2008 at 3:50pm —
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WiMAX appears to moving to right (Silicon Valley talk for "delayed"), especially Mobile WiMAX. Does this open a window for LTE?
Well it might, if two conditions are fulfilled: 1) that LTE can accelerate, and 2) that LTE and WiMAX are competitive. Let's look at these.......
LTE is in trials mode. This is what happens when a new technology is developed, but is not yet "productized" - big service providers with large budgets test it out to see if it will perform as well as promised. Later, the st…
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Added by Paul Sergeant on November 5, 2008 at 7:00pm —
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