Maravedis recently announced a comprehensive WiMAX and wireless
broadband market research report entitled “WiMAX
and Broadband Wireless (Sub-11Ghz) Worldwide Market Analysis and Trends
2005-2010”. The study
reports that the broadband wireless market (sub-11Ghz) has grown substantially
over the past two years. Maravedis
projects that the market will exceed $2 billion by the end of 2009.
“The top two pre-requisites for WiMAX success
according to service providers surveyed is a CPE below $300 and higher
throughput” says Adlane Fellah, principal researcher and founder of Maravedis.
According to Robert Syputa, co-author and senior analyst of Maravedis,
“Wireless broadband is clearly at a crossroads. Convergence is taking place
between the technology road maps of WiMAX/802.16 and advanced 3GPP, 3.5G-4G
cellular systems. These technologies are on a collision course and will provide
similar bandwidth and significant market overlap by 2010.”
Fellah continued, “Service providers and end-users
will benefit from the adoption of WiMAX systems which will help reduce equipment
and component costs through integration and economies of scale. We expect the
cost reduction impact to be mostly on the CPE and foresee data only CPE at less
than $100 by 2010.”
According to the report, the adoption of
broadband wireless access (BWA) is driven by the overall explosion in demand for
broadband services. Vendors have made a lot of progress in terms of product
enhancement and cost reduction, thus helping the adoption of BWA as a viable
alternative or complement to DSL and cable. It will face challenges in terms of
spectrum availability and service regulation:
“3.5GHz remains mostly a band allocated to
fixed only services in 77% of the countries surveyed. However the regulators are
starting to revise their positions to allow portable services in a first step
towards allowing full mobility at 3.5GHz. In most of
Europe 2.5-2.69 GHz band is exclusively reserved for UMTS mobile services and is
therefore not available to BWA and WiMAX service providers”, added Adlane
Fellah.
Further, WiMAX will not resolve all
problems service providers are facing today and proprietary systems will
continue to contribute greatly to BWA’s success, within
their niche markets. Both
proprietary and WiMAX compliant systems will continue to improve coverage and
penetration limitations but no system can go beyond the laws of physics and
every deployment will face different challenges.
The
report provides in-depth analysis of 3GPP technologies, TD-CDMA and 802.20 vs.
WiMAX in the mobile space and explains why the next two years will be critical
for WiMAX faith.
The
report contains research, analysis and forecasts for point to point and point to
multi-point systems derived from interviews of service providers, regulators in
fifty countries, 802.16 chipset vendors, WiMAX and proprietary system vendors,
as well as large infrastructure suppliers.
“WiMAX and Broadband Wireless (Sub-11Ghz) Worldwide Market Analysis
and Trends 2005-2010” is available now with the Maravedis.