Asian telecommunications

WiMAX v HSDPA in Asia

As observers of the telecommunications sector have witnessed over and over again, enormous profits and opportunities ride on carriers picking technologies that survive the rigours of full commercial launch. In the mobile market, WiMAX and HSDPA are the technologies du jour. Recent announcements in India, China, Thailand and Singapore have all fuelled speculation as to which technology will ultimately be the main conduit for wireless services.

Indian newspapers made a big fuss this week about WiMAX and how the technology will be the final element in breaching the digital divide. The Economic Times equated WiMAX with a gift from the gods by calling it “agni astra”, which roughly translates to “a flash from heaven”. This follows India’s international carrier, VSNL, re-releasing a press release saying that it had launched a WiMAX trial in Bangalore and that the company intends to extend the network to about 120 cities across India for enterprise customers and five cities for retail customers by the end of this financial year.

The Indian government appears to have made an early decision that WiMAX is the best technology solution. JS Sarma, Telecom Commission Chairman, is quoted saying that if a suitable price point can be met “WiMAX could build on the huge base of copper-wire and fibre-optic connectivity available with BSNL and extend its reach to inaccessible areas by using wireless for the last mile."

Meanwhile, the proponents of WiMAX got a boost from China’s Ministry of Information Industries (MII) with its announcement that it is backing a rollout of 150 WiMAX base stations, covering 90 percent of Beijing’s commercial and residential areas, in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. WiMAX technology will be used to serve the need for high-speed data applications, such as video streaming, with TD-SCDMA reserved for voice and less bandwidth-hungry data, according to Telecommunication.

China Unicom is reportedly testing WiMAX on business and select residential users in five cities, while China Telecom and China Netcom have ordered WiMAX equipment based on the 802.16d fixed standard with the intention of conducting trials.

However, Telecommunications says that big hurdles remain for WiMAX in China. For a start, MII has not reserved any spectrum for WiMAX. The international norm is 2-11GHz, but only 3300-3399MHz and 3531-3600MHz are available in China. The 3.5GHz band, which is commonly used for WiMAX outside China, was assigned to a category of service called fixed wireless access (FWA) in 2004, but FWA has not panned out well and some industry groups now say 3.5GHz would make a good fit for WiMAX. China Unicom, for one, would like to use its right to 3.5GHz for WiMAX testing, but the MII has said this cannot be taken for granted.

While India appears gung-ho for WiMAX and China is hedging its bets, Thailand and Singapore have both appears to favour alternative technologies. Thailand’s Information and Communications Minister Professor Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, is quoted in the Bangkok Post saying that Thailand is very unlikely to allocate the required spectrum “in 15 years, historians will call WiMAX the first attempt at 4G and one that did not work”.

Meanwhile, Singtel Mobile has launched a high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) service in selected areas of the island state, joining rival MobileOne Asia (M1) which introduced commercial HSDPA services six months ago.

At launch, SingTel Mobile’s 3.5G service will offer users maximum theoretical download speeds of up to 3.6Mbps. SingTel Mobile has around 466,000 subscribers signed up to 3G services and intends to entice a sizeable portion onto HSDPA within the next three months, it said. M1 had roughly 390,000 3G users as at 31 March 2007 and is looking to encourage HSDPA take-up by increasing maximum download speeds from the current 3.6Mbps to 14.4Mbps by end-2007. Singapore’s third mobile operator StarHub plans to launch 3.5G services ‘this year’ although it has not produced a timetable for rollout.

Charles Dodgson as published in ExchangeAsia