WiMax multi-hops to hyperconnectivity

Technical advances keep expanding the horizon for WiMax -- if only carriers could get down to delivering on its promise While two key WiMax spectrum owners, Sprint and Clearwire, haggle over bringing broadband wireless to the masses, thanks to companies like Nortel the technology itself continues to evolve in a worthwhile way. Eventually, the spectrum players will sort out their differences -- after all, WiMax m

Technical advances keep expanding the horizon for WiMax -- if only carriers could get down to delivering on its promise

While two key WiMax spectrum owners, Sprint and Clearwire, haggle over bringing broadband wireless to the masses, thanks to companies like Nortel the technology itself continues to evolve in a worthwhile way.

Eventually, the spectrum players will sort out their differences -- after all, WiMax means money in everybody's pocket. In the meantime, wireless users can salivate over what the next generation of WiMax, 802.16m, will bring.

To put 802.16m into perspective, I spoke with Nortel Fellow Wen Tong, leader of advanced research in wireless technology at Nortel, and the holder of dozens of wireless patents. Wen produced the industry's first 348Kbps 3G pre-standard over-the-air prototype and was one of the inventors of the turbo-coding interleaver, a key 3G technology that made transmission over the air more robust. This technology was subsequently adopted by both the 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards groups.

One of the most exciting changes that will come about as WiMax evolves over the next several years is hyperconnectivity -- "what we at Nortel define as the state in which the number of devices, nodes, and applications connected to the network far exceeds the number of people using the network," Wen says.

To understand what that is, think of it this way: Right now telecommunications companies measure connectivity on a per-head basis, Wen tells me. "One head, one phone."

In the future, hyperconnectivity will mean multiple devices with multiple connections, video, phone, IM, and m-to-m (machine-to-machine) connectivity -- the last of which will bring that long-sought lights-out datacenter that IT pros have been talking about for years.

Performance will be around 1Gbps for fixed wireless and 100Mbps for mobile.

But enough about the future. I asked Wen to take us through the steps we need to take to get there.

Today's cell-phone towers are separated by about a kilometer. Because they sit on a lower frequency, that distance is sufficient.

But WiMax will find a home at a higher band, 2.5Mhz. At that frequency, network providers will need more sites.

IEEE 802.16m will resolve the problem. For your information, .16m will replace the current standard, .16e, but not for at least two years. And as always, the standard won't be fully enabled out of the gates. Once the standard is in place, it takes several years to optimize it.

IEEE 802.16m brings a couple of major and fundamental improvements to WiMax that within the next five years will lead us to hyperconnectivity.