All beefed up for action

Coming soon: a new high-speed wireless boadband.

Imagine the wi-fi hot-spots "" which allow you to surf the Net wirelessly at the airport, coffee shop, business centre or a hotel "" extending to a larger area with higher speeds, and you would know what "Wimax" is all about.

Often referred to as "wi-fi on steroids", Wimax or Wireless Interoperability of Microwave Access, is a low cost wireless broadband technology that could solve India's problem of poor Internet penetration, especially in the rural hinterland.

Wimax offers a cheaper option to competing broadband technologies like DSL (digital subscriber line) which uses the regular copper phone wire to give Net access, and is also cheaper than the cable-modem option.

Estimates suggest that about 3 per cent of total broadband subscribers, or around 10 million subscribers worldwide, will be using Wimax-based broadband wireless access services by 2009.

There are, however, some roadblocks en route. For starters, the spectrum (2.5 GHz) required for the roll-out needs to be de-licensed and made available.

"We have had encouraging discussions with the regulator who has assured spectrum allocation within this year," says Dr Mohammad Shakouri, board director and vice president (marketing), Wimax Forum.

At the other end, the customer premises equipment must be made available, and at affordable prices.

"A global spectrum is essential to allow manufacturers to mass-produce low-priced equipment and ensure that Wimax devices work within different geographies. This will provide the technology the economies of scale so necessary for its future success," says Shakouri.

Wimax can support point to multi-point broadband wireless access rates up to 2 mbps (mega bits per second) "" that is almost 80 times more than a good dial-up connection of about 25 kbps (kilo bits per second) "" and over a range of tens of kilometres instead of wi-fi's range of a few hundred metres.

Countries like Taiwan, Japan and Korea have invested million of dollars in Wimax. "Korea and Japan are already a witness to the transformative power of a ubiquitous broadband connectivity (Wimax) that can support real-time multimedia, Internet telephony and streaming video," he says.

Deepak Maheshwari, secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association, feels that besides opening the spectrum, the country needs to zero in upon an optimal pricing for the spectrum, based on factors like location density and usage.

There is another interesting development for India, where adoption of mobiles has outpaced the adoption of broadband "" the imminent marriage of mobility and wireless broadband.

"The Wimax Forum is already talking of the (802.16e) air interface standard that addresses portable and mobile applications, the next step after fixed access Wimax," remarks Sunil Kumar from Wimax Forum (India Liaison), adding that telecom leaders like Tata and Bharti should be proactive in supporting Wimax.

"Network operators can have a head start while deploying Wimax access technology because they can install new radios at their existing cell sites," adds Maheshwari.

Wimax Forum is also working on a next generation broadband access that gives a whopping 40 mbps by 2010 and 1 gbps (giga bit per second) by 2020. With technology, nothing's impossible!