Intel said its goal is to expand its mobile and embedded product offerings to support additional market segments, including smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks and embedded computing devices

German chipset manufacturer Infineon confirmed the rumours on Monday, announcing the sale of its Wireless Solutions division (WLS) to US chip giant Intel for $1.4bn.

Intel has been in the frame for the acquisition for several weeks, with Infineon cited as an attractive prospect not least because it is the supplier of baseband chips for the Apple iPhone. Intel has its Atom media processor business which targets portable devices and smartphones but lacks cellular chipset assets including basebands and RF chips. In this respect, Infineon’s wireless business complements Intel’s Atom business and enables the US company to offer more integrated chipsets similar to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon.

The WLS unit will operate as a standalone business, Intel said, and will continue to support Infineon’s existing customers, including support for ARM-based platforms. Infineon will now concentrate its resources on core segments in the automotive, industrial and chip card and security markets.

The acquisition expands Intel’s wifi and WiMAX offerings to include 3G as well as giving the firm a path to LTE. Intel said its goal is to expand its mobile and embedded product offerings to support additional market segments, including smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks and embedded computing devices.

“The global demand for wireless solutions continues to grow at an extraordinary rate,” said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. “The acquisition of Infineon’s WLS business strengthens the second pillar of our computing strategy – Internet connectivity – and enables us to offer a portfolio of products that covers the full range of wireless options from wifi and 3G to WiMAX and LTE. As more devices compute and connect to the internet, we are committed to making certain that Intel is well positioned to take advantage of the growth potential in every computing segment, from laptops to handhelds.”

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Clearwire is to examine coexistence scenarios between the WiMAX and LTE 4G technologies

US operator and WiMAX pin up Clearwire is to trial LTE and examine coexistence scenarios between the 4G technologies. The announcement was accompanied by much bravado about how Clearwire is better placed to do LTE than any other US carrier.

The company said its trials of 4G are “expected to yield unmatched wireless speeds in the US,” and are designed “to showcase the unique capability of Clearwire’s unmatched spectrum holdings.” But in a phrase that could be interpreted as an acknowledgement that an LTE strategy is necessary, the company also said it was motivated to examine a variety of potential future technology combinations due to the fact that lots of LTE-enabled devices are expected to be available in the future.

The tests will be conducted through late 2010 and early 2011 in Phoenix, Arizona, using kit from Huawei, Samsung, Beceem and others. Clearwire intends to conduct FDD LTE tests using 40MHz of spectrum, paired in 20MHz contiguous channels, of its 2.5GHz spectrum. The company will concurrently test TDD LTE in a 20MHz configuration and will also test WiMAX co-existence with both FDD LTE and TDD LTE to confirm the flexibility of its network.

Clearwire expects to produce real-world download speeds that range from 20-70Mbps, which is significantly faster than the 5-12Mbps speeds currently envisioned by other LTE deployments in the US, which will rely on smaller pairs of 10MHz channels or less.

John Saw, Clearwire’s chief technology officer, said: “As we have consistently stated, we remain technology agnostic, but WiMAX provides us with unique advantages to meet the needs of our customers today. Ultimately, consumers don’t care about technical acronyms, but they do care about quality and affordable Internet services that work where and when they want, and that’s what we’re focused on delivering. Part of our technical due diligence at Clearwire is to be prepared to leverage a number of possible opportunities as we future-proof our network, and that’s the goal of these tests.”

Clearwire increased its operating loss 116 per cent year on year and 28 per cent consecutively to $520.7m during the three months to end-June. But revenues were up 93 per cent year on year and 15 per cent quarter on quarter to $122m.

The operator ended the second quarter with 1.7 million total subscribers consisting of 940,000 retail subscribers and 752,000 wholesale subscribers. During the period, Clearwire added 722,000 total net new subscribers including 127,000 retail additions and 595,000 wholesale additions.

This week Clearwire struck a deal with Cbeyond, a provider of voice, broadband, mobile and IT applications to more than 52,000 small businesses across the country, under which Cbeyond will offer bundled 4G mobile internet services to small businesses in early 2011.

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Auctions for LTE spectrum have already begun, with carriers looking at the digital dividend and the 3G extension band

On April 12th this year Germany became the first country in Europe to start the award of the 800MHz spectrum—the so called ‘digital dividend’. While amounts bid did not reach anything like the dizzying heights of 3G licensing that we witnessed in 2000, it should prove to be a valuable band. All eyes will be on Germany, as over the next few years other national regulators around the world are set to follow and release a significant amount of some of the most valuable spectrum that exists. How much will be released in each country and what it will be used for are key questions on everyone’s mind.

Ovum has recently developed, and will continuously update, an internal database of spectrum awards around the world to help answer these questions. To kick-off our new research in this area we have looked at what spectrum is likely to be used for LTE services and where in Europe these awards are taking place.

We can’t see it, touch it, or hear it, but radio spectrum is central to our lives. It is the essential raw material for all mobile services and, like many raw materials, it is a finite and therefore extremely valuable resource for which demand is increasing all the time.

As consumers demand broadband on the move and governments outline ambitions for ubiquitous broadband, more capacity will be required to support the huge demands placed on the network. Eventually, network operators will need to upgrade their infrastructure to nextgeneration (or 4G) technologies, meaning that more of this valuable resource will be required.

There are currently two main competing technologies that will be deployed for next-generation mobile services: mobile WiMAX and LTE. Each has its own benefits and the choice in many cases will come down to local market circumstances.

From a spectrum policy point of view, however, there is a key difference between the two. Mobile WiMAX is currently TDD based (using unpaired spectrum) whereas LTE will primarily be FDD in the short to medium term and uses paired spectrum. The TDD version of LTE, TD-LTE, will appear in Europe later on. By deciding how spectrum is packaged, when it is released, and the conditions attached to its use, regulators and policymakers have the ability to influence which technology is deployed.

However, it is not for national regulators to pick winners; that is something that the market must decide. Instead they must concern themselves with getting the enabling factors right. These include taking the necessary steps to ensure that adequate spectrum is available and packaged in such a way so that either technology can use it. Crucially, they must also design and structure rollout obligations in a way that complements the spectrum being offered and encourages bidding.

The auctions will be more sober affairs than the bidding frenzies that characterised the 3G spectrum auctions in the early part of the last decade, but regulators will still be keen to ensure that spectrum is awarded only to those who value it most. Only then can governments and regulators work towards creating an environment where the availability of mobile broadband is increased, and where it can play an important contributory role in achieving near-universal broadband.

While the common principles of technology and service neutrality will apply, a certain amount of harmonisation is both desirable and necessary. Spectrum policy is one of the few remaining areas where there is still a heavy-handed regulatory approach. Recognising the importance of market-based principles is a prerequisite for effective regulatory policy and will eventually dictate when auctions take place, how much spectrum is made available, how it is packaged, and the rules around how it should be used.

Slowly but surely, national regulators are implementing market mechanisms in the belief that the best way to secure the optimal use of spectrum is to limit regulation to the essentials, for example preventing harmful interference and ensuring fair competition. However, spectrum does not respect national borders and so, if one country uses a particular band for one purpose and a neighbour uses it for another, problems will quickly develop. For this reason, harmonisation between countries is encouraged and also serves to increase the size of the potential market and scope for economies of scale for equipment manufacturers.

The rationale for a coordinated approach is largely derived from the fact that next-generation technologies require large blocks of spectrum (either operated by a single party or multiple parties working collectively with contiguous spectrum) for their potential to be fully realised. Best performance for LTE FDD is achieved using 2 x 20MHz blocks, and truly national high-capacity networks will require spectrum at both low and high frequencies. Addressing these requirements in an integrated way, if achieved quickly, should give operators greater certainty over their future spectrum holdings, while continuing to support a competitive market outcome.

The digital dividend (800MHz) and 2.6GHz bands are set to be favourites for LTE. Taken together, they represent a very significant increase in the amount of spectrum that will be available for mobile broadband. It is here where operators will be looking to deploy next-generation technologies, in particular LTE, as no profile has yet been defined for mobile WiMAX at 800MHz. It is where all the efforts around standards and the efforts of the vendors in terms of developing equipment is being focused, not least because the existing 900MHz and 1800MHz bands are heavily used by existing GSM services and, before you are able to reuse those frequencies, you have to clear them of existing users. In the longer term, these bands can be refarmed, but at the moment there has been limited interest.

The 2.6GHz spectrum band, which has been identified globally by the ITU as the “3G extension band”, will be vital in satisfying the demand for greater capacity for mobile broadband and supporting networks such as LTE, which have already started to be deployed commercially around the world. However, progress so far has been slow, with the 2.6GHz band having been awarded in only a handful of countries (Finland, Hong Kong, Norway, and Sweden). That is set to change in 2010 with at least another seven countries (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain) scheduled to auction this band.

While higher frequencies are particularly suited to significantly increasing data capacity in high-demand zones such as dense urban areas, in rural areas the costs associated with deploying a network using this band are mostly prohibitive. The natural propagation characteristics of spectrum mean that, at lower frequencies, airways travel further and can penetrate buildings well.

It is for this reason that the digital dividend—the spectrum that is freed-up on switchover from analogue to digital TV—is also of interest. As such, in the medium term, we expect the digital dividend frequencies to be used for wide-area and in-building coverage, achieved with a small number of base stations, complemented by the 2.6GHz band to achieve a good amount of capacity for large numbers of end users in dense (urban) environments.

On the whole, the 2.6GHz and 800MHz bands will be the most popular, but in some instances (such as in Finland, France, and the UK) operators are considering re-farming existing bands—notably the 900/1800MHz bands. However, both these bands are heavily used by existing technologies and clearing them will not be straightforward (the UK provides a good example of the challenges that will be faced). As such, LTE will coexist with legacy mobile network technologies for at least the next ten years, particularly since GSM will still provide the backbone of voice communication.

Matthew Howett is a Senior Telecoms Analyst at Ovum

UK perators are unlikely to get their hands on the attractive 2.6GHz band before 2012

UK communications regulator Ofcom has finally been given the go ahead to move forward with the auctioning of 4G spectrum, as well as the refarming of 2G spectrum so it can be used for 3G services. However, ongoing delays have put the country behind other parts of Western Europe and operators are unlikely to get their hands on the attractive 2.6GHz band before 2012.

On Wednesday, the UK’s Minister for Communications, Ed Vaizey, tasked Ofcom with a spectrum modernisation programme that will result in the combined auction of the 2.6GHz and digital dividend 800MHz spectrum as well as the liberalisation and refarming of 2G spectrum at 900MHz and 1800MHz to allow operators to use these frequencies for 3G technologies.

However, the auctions will not take place until late 2011 at the earliest, putting the UK behind other European nations such as Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden, which have already awarded 2.6GHz spectrum and in some cases, seen it in commercial use. The UK initiative has to date been hamstrung by operator disputes over how the spectrum should be awarded, as well as the recent change in UK Government.

Under the initiative, Ofcom will also make 3G licences indefinite to encourage greater investment; make these licenses tradable; but to apply annual licence fees to reflect the market value of these licences (to be applied after the initial licence term ends on December 31, 2021).

There will also be a “generous compensation package” to support the Programme Making and Special Events users (PMSE) – such as musicians and theatres, which are being evicted from the 800MHz spectrum they currently use for wireless microphones for example. The funding will make a significant contribution to the costs of upgrading equipment to suit a new operating frequency from 2012.

Nokia Siemens is paying $1.2bn for Motorola's networks unit

Infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens Networks has announced that it is to acquire “certain network infrastructure assets” from US competitor Motorola for $1.2bn. The Finnish-German joint venture said that it expects to gain new relationships with 50 wireless carriers and strengthen existing commercial ties as a result of the deal, which the two firms expect to close before the end of 2010.

Motorola’s networks portfolio caters to a range of technologies, from GSM and CDMA, through WCDMA to WiMAX and LTE. The US vendor will be keeping hold of its iDEN business, however, and will also retain”substantially all the patents related to its wireless network infrastructure business and other selected assets,” the firms said.

Motorola is one of the leading suppliers of WiMAX technology, with 41 contracts in 21 countries, while its CDMA footprint runs to 30 networks in 22 countries. The benefits of these elements of the portfolio for NSN are most likely to revolve around forthcoming technology decisions from the operators involved, as both CDMA and WiMAX are now seen as having limited futures.

The evolutionary roadmap for CDMA is at its end and leading operators of the technology are in the midst of high profile moves to deploy LTE. Meanwhile WiMAX has struggled to gain traction, with some of the technology’s most high profile supporters, including Alvarion and Sprint, publicly embracing the rival 4G technology as well. India’s recent BWA auctions were seen as a last attempt for the technology to secure some meaningful deployments but early indications are that the majority of new licensees are keen to focus on LTE.

NSN itself pulled away from WiMAX last year and has never had a foothold in the CDMA networks business. The firm seems primarily interested in the carrier relationships that come with the Motorola networks business, rather than the technology. There is clearly a hope that, when upgrades and technology switches take place, those relationships will improve NSN’s chances of winning business.

“As customers look to transition from CDMA networks to next generation technologies, the addition of the Motorola wireless network infrastructure business is targeted to ensure that we are well placed to meet those needs,” said Bosco Novak, head of customer operations at NSN.

Geographically, NSN said it expected the main benefits to come in the US and Japan, where it has not previously had a particularly strong position. China Mobile, Clearwire, KDDI, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone were all name-checked by NSN as organisations with which its relationship would deepend as a result of the purchase.

Some 7,500 Motorola employees are expected to move to NSN as part of the deal, including staff at large R&D sites in the US, China and India.

Julian Bright, senior analyst at Informa said that, while the deal made sense in light of NSN’s need to be more aggressive in the market, it would likely bring with it fresh challenges. “NSN struggled with the original merger of the two companies and the integration with Motorola will probably add to its woes,” Bright said. “The new entity represents a tough mix of nationalities, with the combination of US, German and Finnish cultures. While there are opportunities for the merger to enable the creation of more integrated solutions such as Single RAN, NSN first needs to overcome the problems associated with integrating a new vendor’s RAN equipment with its own existing core network, backhaul, network and subscriber management products.”

Still, head honcho Bert Nordberg said the company was displaying “continued momentum” even if the initial impetus has tailed off somewhat. Sales were up both consecutively and year on year however to €1.7bn although unit shipments were down slightly year on year at 11 million.

The good cheer continued over in Mountain View, California, where Google reported its customary increase in earnings, from $1.4bn in 2Q09 to $1.8bn in 2Q10, while revenues jumped 24 per cent year on year to $6.82bn. The search giant doesn’t break out mobile in its earnings, but expect it to be a growing part of the business, especially now that the AdMob deal is good to go ahead.

Chip giant Intel also reported its best ever quarter, with revenues rising 34 per cent year on year to reach $10.8bn in the second quarter of 2010. Net income for the same period was up 175 per cent year on year to $2.9bn. The good fortune was largely down to strong demand for desktop processors in the corporate space but Intel said Atom microprocessor and chipset revenue, which targets portable devices and smartphones, hit $413m during the quarter, up 16 per cent sequentially.

However the semiconductor giant lacks cellular chipset assets including basebands and RF chips and is presently understood to have its eye on Infineon’s wireless business, which would complement its Atom business. According to Malik Kamal Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, the acquisition of Infineon’s wireless business could help Intel to serve all segments of the mobile market, while Infineon’s HSPA/LTE baseband assets that currently power a number of successful smartphones including Apple’s iPhone, could enable the company to offer more integrated chipsets similar to Snapdragon offered by Qualcomm

There was more M&A speculation this week with Nokia Siemens Networks believed to be mulling a bid for Motorola’s networks business. The number being bandied around in the press is between $1.1bn and $1.3bn, but the Informer does not think it would be a marriage made in heaven. What with every operator and its dog jumping to LTE, Motorola’s CDMA business has a finite lifespan, and NSN’s not really interested in its WiMAX bits either. The Finnish-German vendor did lose out on Nortel’s CDMA and LTE assets last year but the fact that it didn’t bid big bucks against Ericsson suggests that it wasn’t desperate for them. So really the only thing Motorola’s got that NSN might want is a foothold in North America. A classic case of the potential partner being well past their sell by date but still having a nice place in the Hamptons. But whether that’s worth a dowry of more than $1bn remains to be seen.

Going back to LTE for a moment and the 4G love-in continued with Israeli infrastructure vendor Alvarion, a company that bills itself as a “founder of the WiMAX industry,” evidently deciding that if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, by announcing plans to start making LTE kit.

The firm, which was badly burned by Nortel’s demise, has decided not to put all its eggs in one basket and has expanded its product line to support the TD-LTE standard. Alvarion expects to engage in TD-LTE field trials in the first quarter of 2011 and will incorporate TD-LTE support into its 4Motion infrastructure portfolio.

Eran Gorev, president and CEO of Alvarion, was quick to point out that the company will continue to actively drive WiMAX activities but said: “The trend in wireless spectrum availability around the globe supports the fact that unpaired TDD spectrum will have an even greater role to play for broadband wireless deployments in the future.”

To be fair, this does fit with what the Informer has heard about the potential for TDD spectrum, and it does seem that there is growing momentum behind the TD-LTE flavour of the technology, even outside of China where China Mobile is flying the flag having already had enough of TD-SCDMA.

Over in Oz, Telstra announced that it has successfully tested LTE in its 1800MHz spectrum, tapping Chinese vendor Huawei to deliver the equipment. The carrier will continue to evaluate the technology in Victoria, using MIMO antenna configurations as well as several advanced features including Inter Cell Interference Coordination to reduce radio network interference and improve throughput, and Self Organising Networks. Telstra expects its 1800MHz spectrum deployments to complement the 2600MHz spectrum and the 700MHz band anticipated to be made available through the digital dividend.

US WiMAX pin up Sprint is also knowing to be considering its options with LTE, after chief executive Dan Hesse said that the company is mulling a deployment of LTE alongside its existing WiMAX network. This week the carrier switched on WiMAX services in a handful of other US cities and revealed that its first WiMAX-enabled handset, the HTC Evo 4G, is selling so well HTC can’t deliver units fast enough.

Still at least HTC’s Android devices won’t self destruct. Crafty handset hackers have discovered that Motorola’s recently announced Droid X, which will be available on Verizon Wireless this summer, has an anti-tamper mechanism called eFuse that will permanently kill the handset if someone tries to modify or install another operating system, which one might think goes against the open source ethos of the Android operating system no?

In other Android news, free mapping and navigation firm Skobbler has launched a version of its app for Android, citing great success for the iPhone version, which was released just four weeks ago and has already chalked up 82,000 downloads in the UK. Vodafone was also getting free in the mapping sense, making its location based services software open source after its little jaunt with Wayfinder reached a dead end.

The Flying V bought Swedish location firm Wayfinder for €26m in December 2008 but revealed in March this year that the unit would cease operations in the face of free offerings from the likes of Nokia and Google. Now Vodafone is releasing its code in the hope of stimulating development from independent players that will see new applications brought forth for its customers.

Meanwhile, Apple chief Steve Jobs himself swam down to the Gulf seabed on Thursday and did what no one else could do, even Kevin Costner: he plugged the leaking BP oil well with his iPhone (is there an app for that?). Ok, he didn’t actually do that but his feat tonight will be on a similar par if you believe the foam-mouthed and frenzied consumer press. Apple is holding a special press conference, presumably to deal with the leaky antenna issues plaguing the iPhone 4, but the big question is, will they hold it the right way? (Boom boom).

Now is it the stormy weather, old age, or not enough milk as a child that makes the Informer’s bones ache so? It’s comforting to know that the industry which has fed and nurtured him so well over the decades also intends to look after him through his golden years. There’s been a right flurry of activity in the mobile healthcare sector led by Telefónica, which launched a global e-health unit tasked with the decentralisation of clinical processes and ubiquitous and remote access to these services.

According to the slightly depressing presentations given in Madrid on Tuesday, by Trinidad Jiménez, Spain’s minister of health, and Telefónica chairman, César Alierta, in 2010, 13.5 per cent of the world’s population – 980 million people – will be over 65, and 60 per cent of these will suffer from chronic and degenerative illnesses. This situation, combined with the current shortfall of specialists in key medical assistance sectors, and the fact that these specialists must spend between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of their time on administrative tasks instead of healthcare activities, are putting additional pressure on public healthcare budgets. But not to fear, mobile technology can save the day.

Orange UK is also in on the action with Smartnumbers, a healthcare specific service that gives callers instant access to the best placed person or team available, providing patients and workers with the ability to reach the right person the first time they call.

Pay attention: you’ll be needing this kind of thing before you know it. Like the man sang, it’s later than you think.

And on that cheery note, the Informer bids you a good weekend.

Take care

The Informer

Alvarion, a company that bills itself as a “founder of the WiMAX industry,” is to start making TD-LTE kit

Israeli infrastructure vendor Alvarion, a company that bills itself as a “founder of the WiMAX industry,” is to start making LTE kit for the TDD flavour of the 4G technology.

This week, the firm said it had expanded its product line to support the TD-LTE standard in order to offer an open and flexible platform for TDD-based 4G networks, catering to operators which have unpaired spectrum to offer wireless broadband services over. Alvarion expects to engage in TD-LTE field trials in the first quarter of 2011 and will incorporate TD-LTE support into its 4Motion infrastructure portfolio.

Eran Gorev, president and CEO of Alvarion, was quick to point out that the company will continue to actively drive WiMAX standardization activities, ecosystem development and product delivery, but said “The trend in wireless spectrum availability around the globe supports the fact that unpaired TDD spectrum will have an even greater role to play for broadband wireless deployments in the future.”

“TDD spectrum is relatively plentiful, cost effective and creates attractive opportunities for broadband applications over this spectrum,” said Gorev. “Our development effort over the past two years has been designed to accommodate the support for TD-LTE as a natural extension of our existing solution.”

Indeed, TD-LTE has surprised a number of industry commentators by the level of support it is winning. When telecoms.com recently spoke to Stéphane Téral, directing analyst at Infonetics Research, he said: “One year ago it was not clear that TD-LTE had a future, until China Mobile confirmed it was moving away from 3G (TD-SCDMA) anyway. But now other operators outside of China are looking at TD-LTE technology and finding some potential,” Téral said. “If you are a mobile operator who is challenging an incumbent you may well not have paired spectrum, and if you want to upgrade unpaired spectrum onto LTE then TDD looks like a very good proposition. So now there is a clear case for TD-LTE everywhere in the world

Sprint chief executive Dan Hesse has said that the company is also considering a shift to LTE

US carrier Sprint this week launched WiMAX in a handful of new metropolitan areas amid speculation that the firm is also considering an LTE strategy that could pave the way to a merger with T-Mobile USA.

The WiMAX poster child switched on its 4G service in Rochester, N.Y., Syracuse, N.Y., Merced, Calif., Visalia, Calif., Eugene, Ore., Tri-Cities, Wash., and Yakima, Wash. taking the company’s 4G offering to 43 markets, with plans for Los Angeles, New York and Miami by the end of 2010.

Sprint has launched a hard hitting marketing campaign, pitching its 4G service as delivering download speeds “up to ten times faster than 3G”. The carrier’s WiMAX network covers 43 million people across 33 markets and Sprint expects to have up to 120 million people covered by the end of 2010. Last month the company trumpeted the launch of its first WiMAX-enabled handset, the HTC Evo 4G, which sold so well it marked the largest quantity of a single phone sold in one day ever for Sprint.

In fact it is now understood that HTC can’t deliver Evos fast enough, putting something of a crimp in Sprint’s plans to boost its subscriber base.

In the background however, chief executive Dan Hesse has said that the company is also considering a shift to LTE, as a dual 4G strategy alongside WiMAX.

The news has reignited speculation of a potential merger between Sprint and Deutsche Telekom’s US operation, T-Mobile USA, which is also likely to follow the LTE route.

Want to find out more about all the latest LTE news happening in North America?  Attend our LTE North America large-scale conference and exhibition taking place in Dallas, Texas on 10-11 November 2010.  For more information please visit: www.lteconference.com/northamerica

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