Is there still hope for WiMAX in the UK?

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 23 Aug 2010 at 14:29

“There are lots of vertical markets that need 4G and don't want to wait the years it will take to for 4G via LTE to arrive – fire brigades, for example,” said Petherham. “Any 4G will require a significant capital investment, and that's once spectrum for the LTE services becomes available next year. If people are suffering congestion now they really only have one way to go and that's WiMAX.”

LTE moving ahead

In the meantime, O2 says its trials of the LTE platform are moving ahead and that users are seeing a big leap in productivity.

“We’re seeing throughput of 150Mbits/sec from the base station and on the street people are achieving up to 65Mbits/sec,” said Andrew Conway, head of radio engineering at O2. “Obviously during these tests the traffic is fairly light, but over the six sites that are operational users are seeing a 1,000-fold increase in performance compared to 3G.”

In the face of such boasts from mobile carriers, it is perhaps not surprising that UK Broadband is looking to specialist services to make use of its technology.

If the company can fill gaps in the UK broadband landscape by using WiMAX to deliver connectivity to rural areas, it may also help the government meet its commitment to make sure every home in Britain has access to broadband at 2Mbits/sec before the next general election.

We can demonstrate 10Mbits/sec to a dongle, and the minimum would be about 2Mbits/sec

According to Petheram, the technology has a footprint of 5-10Km and drops off much less slowly with distance compared with 3G, so could be useful in rural villages.

“We can demonstrate 10Mbits/sec to a dongle, and the minimum would be about 2Mbits/sec,” he said, adding such connections would suffer from contention.

Whether UK Broadband can make WiMAX work in the rural broadband market remains to be seen – others have talked up the technology, but few if any have delivered in the UK.

Freedom4 - which previously held the licences for WiMAX spectrum and in June sold them as part of a £12 million package to UK Broadband - called the deal “to good an offer to refuse”.