WLL never looked so good: now that wireless local loop technology, once hyped as the ultimate teledensity booster, has gone through its reality check, improved technologies and wiser business models could be the key to a WLL comeback—but not necessarily for the rural pops - Wireless

Telecom Asia, Oct, 2002 by John C. Tanner

In most of Asia's underdeveloped telecoms markets, the mobile option is a series of trade-offs. Mobile is more expensive and data connections aren't good for much more than email, but you can get service in less than 24 hours, and prepaid is an option. Fixed lines are comparatively cheaper (particularly in markets where regulators set price caps), and support enough data bandwidth for fax and dial-up Web surfing, but the waiting list in underdeveloped areas is usually measured in years.

Note that data is a more prominent issue for telecoms access than it was, say, five or six years ago when WLL hype was gaining momentum. The ITU's telecoms development bureau has been especially vocal on the "digital divide" issue, citing stats from a recently commissioned report that underdeveloped markets account for 10% of the global population but only 0.13% of the world's Internet users.

"Value added services is not a secondary concern for WLL," says Nortel's Jezouin. "Voice is fine, but you can do better, and why not? Value added services bring in more revenues."

Margon of Cape Range Wireless argues that this is an inherent weakness of cellular-based WLL. "If you're going to offer Internet access, it has to be at least compatible with 56k, because that's what most Internet users are used to. Something like CDMA WLL can't deliver that."

That may soon change, however, since cellular-based WLL is already moving in this direction via next-gen technologies. Last month, Indonesian carrier Ratelindo contracted Nortel for WLL gear using cdma2000 1x, while Israeli fixed wireless vendor Innowave has a new product out, WaveGain-2, that utilizes W-CDMA.

Losing your voice

Of course, point-to-point and point-to-multipoint technologies live for high-speed wireless, and while such technologies have had limited success so far, they're still out there, and they're still in demand, says Oded Milstein, director of sales at fixed wireless access vendor Alvarion.

"The 3.5-GHz market is opening up worldwide," Milstein says. "3.5-GHz spectrum has already been made available in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Australia, and more countries are opening up their 3.5-GHz bands."

Indeed, last year China's MII issued 3.5 GHz licenses to six firms, including China Mobile, in Nanjing, Qingdao, Xiamen, Wuhan and Chongqing, and more may be on the way before the end of this year. In Cambodia, Millicom's CamGSM is using 3.5 GHz Alvarion gear to offer wireless broadband access for small businesses and high-end residential customers, with connections between 64 kbps and 2 Mbps.

Point-to-point and point-to-multipoint technology R&D hasn't been sitting idle, either. Cape Range Wireless, for instance, uses a proprietary IP-based spread spectrum interface called IPMA that Margon claims hens better processing gain that gives it data throughput that's six- to- eight times better than W-CDMA. "What we do looks like ATM at low utilization, then it starts approaching TDMA levels when it's fully utilized," he says.