The GSMA has told Taiwan that LTE has won the NGMN battle over WIMAX

The GSM Association (GSMA) has suggested to the government of Taiwan that the country should move away from WiMAX and focus instead on LTE, in order to take advantage of the economies of scale provided by the now mainstream next generation mobile standard.

Taiwan has been a big backer of WiMAX technology, predominantly due to the backing of global computer chip maker Intel. The country has no less than six WiMAX operators: FarEasTone, Fitel, Global Mobile, Tatung, Vee Telecom, and VMAX Telecom.

However, local confidence in the technology has been shaken since Intel closed its Taiwanese WiMAX office in 2010.

WiMAX has seen its global market share greatly shrink over recent years, while globally LTE has dominated operators’ agendas over the last 12 months.

“Although local demand will drive the WiMAX market, given the smaller market size in terms of lower demand, it is in Taiwan’s best interest to focus on the manufacturing of HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) wireless networking and LTE equipment rather than WiMAX equipment,” Chris Perera, GSMA director of spectrum policy and regulatory affairs for the Asia Pacific region told the second 4G International Forum in Taipei.

Perera also offered called upon the local regulator, the National Communications Commission (NCC), make it easier for local WiMAX operators deploy spectrum best suited for LTE, such as the 700MHz band.

“The NCC’s most important task is to ensure that the reallocation of spectrum in the 700MHz band is as efficient as possible. The regulator must also facilitate changes in WiMAX operators’ licensing conditions to deploy LTE,” she said.

Recently, Michael Lai, of Malaysian operator Packet One told Telecoms.com that it plans to refarm 20MHz of its 2.3GHz bandwidth from WIMAX to LTE. Lai also hopes to gain access to 700MHz spectrum for LTE as soon as it becomes available.

The sixth annual LTE Asia conference, takes place in Suntec, Singapore, on the 5-7th September 2011

Taiwan follows India and the US in raising concerns over Huawei's links to Chinese security services

Taiwan has become the lastest market to voice concerns over the use of network equipment from Chinese vendor Huawei, with the regulator—the National Communications Commission—ruling that core network kit may not be cleared for use by Taiwanese operators because of national security worries. Huawei has met with similar objections recently in India and the US.

The NCC made its announcement last week, according to an article in the Taipei Times, and the ruling will affect a number of local carriers, including Far EasTone, Taiwan Mobile, and Vibo, which have all bought kit from Huawei. The Times said that some of the kit purchased was being held up at customs. The carriers will have to gain approval from the NCC and the Taiwanese Investigation Bureau before the kit can be installed.

While this is not great news for Huawei, the spat may be little more than a spot of flag waving from the Taiwanese authorities. Taiwan’s relationship with China remains a contentious issue, and Huawei may simply be caught in the crossfire of a larger dispute.

Earlier this year Huawei’s most senior US executive wrote an open letter denying any links between the company and the Chinese state security services, after the firm was forced to withdraw from the acquisition of 3Leaf.

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Chunghwa has been testing LTE for six months

Taiwanese carrier Chunghwa Telecom has demonstrated LTE in a field trial enabled by Alcatel-Lucent’s equipment, supporting a wide variety of LTE devices from various Taiwanese terminal manufacturers.

The LTE network was implemented by Alcatel-Lucent in October 2010 and over the past six months Alcatel-Lucent and Chunghwa Telecom Laboratories have carried out comprehensive and intensive field trials in both 2.6GHz and 700MHz frequency bands. The LTE trial focused on testing the radio frequency network performance in terms of coverage and penetration, especially high-speed IP-based data transmission using MIMO technology.

Tests performed on a high-speed train achieved speeds over FTP of 90Mbps on the downlink and 34.2Mbps on the uplink while the train was running at 281 Km/h with smooth handovers between the base stations. The trial also demonstrated low latencies of less than 115ms.

Five local device manufacturers – HTC, Quanta, BandRich, Zyxel/MitraStar, and WNC/Wistron – provided a total of ten different types of device in various form factors, ranging from smartphones to USB dongles, routers and tablet PCs for the trials.

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Far EasTone launches WiMAX in Taiwan

Taiwanese operator Far EasTone (FET) this week launched its commercial WiMAX service in Taichung city, delivering entertainment focused content such as music and movies as well as wireless internet access.

The carrier is not expected to deliver voice services over WiMAX for fear of impacting its existing cellular user base. FET is the third largest operator in Taiwan, with 6.2 million GSM and WCDMA subscribers, of which 1.5 million are on the 3G network.

Motorola’s Home & Networks Mobility division delivered the kit for the rollout, which FET is pitching as a low cost alternative to home DSL. It also supports nomadic usage by business users and consumers and claims the connection is accommodating for heavy mobile internet users who often download large files and movies, music or gaming on the go.

Vodafone breaks into Taiwan

Vodafone, the world’s largest operator in terms of revenues, struck a deal with Chunghwa Telecom on Thursday, bringing the Big Red brand to the Taiwanese market.

Under one of its non-equity partner market agreements, Chunghwa gains exclusive access to a range of products, services and devices from Vodafone to offer to its Taiwanese customers. Meanwhile, Vodafone customers will be able to access ‘home’ services within Taiwan.

Chunghwa will also draw on Vodafone’s experience in supply chain management, technology development, the acquisition of enterprise customers as well as improved inter-working between networks.

The move increases Vodafone’s presence in Asia, where it already has agreements in place with China Mobile, SmarTone in Hong Kong, M1 in Singapore, Celcom in Malaysia, Dialog in Sri Lanka, dtac in Thailand, SoftBank in Japan, and Vodafone Fiji.

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Taiwanese Mobile WiMAX players demo roaming services

Taiwanese Mobile WiMAX operator VMax Telecom teamed up with Korean equipment manufacturer Samsung on Monday to demonstrate what they claim is the industry’s first Mobile WiMAX roaming service.

At the Broadband Taiwan conference, Samsung and VMax demonstrated a Mobile Internet Device called Mondi registered on the Clearwire network in the US, roaming on VMax’s network, as well as interoperability between VMax’s service in northern Taiwan and Tatung’s WiMAX network in southern Taiwan.

VMax plans to provide commercial Mobile WiMAX service this year in Taipei City, Taiwan and will then expand the service to six additional major regions – including Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Miaoli, Keelung, Yilan and Lienchiang.

VMax is a joint venture between Taiwanese players Tecom and Vibo Telecom.

National roaming is a particularly pressing issue in Taiwan where the three WiMAX licensees in the southern part of the island need to form roaming agreements with the three WiMAX licensees in the northern part if the operators are to achieve their stated aim of nationwide coverage.

The WiMAX Forum announced the first WiMAX operator roaming trial between Clearwire and Digital Bridge Communications (DBC), two US Mobile WiMAX operators using 2.5GHz spectrum, in the summer.

I was speaking to Lai at the WiMAX Forum Congress Asia event, held in Singapore, last week. And he was optimistic, as were many of the Congress Asia delegates, that WiMAX could indeed make it ‘big’ through the large-scale WiMAX projects, such as Clearwire (US), BSNL (India), Yota (Russia) and UQ (Japan). This would, of course, generate better economies of scale for the smaller players and help persuade investors to give WiMAX greater financial backing.

For its part, P1 anticipates it will have 250,000 subscribers by the end of this year, which would be pretty good going as it only launched service in August 2008. One of the main reasons for Lai’s optimism is better performing 802.16e networks compared with the current crop of cellular technologies, including HSPA. “Performance is the big differentiator and key for subscriber acquisition,” says the P1 CEO.

The ‘better-than-cellular’ argument was heard loudly at Congress Asia, but at this year’s event delegates could draw upon examples of 802.16e rollout to make their point. “In our demonstration at service launch, our WiMAX service far exceeded the performance of 3.5G, achieving up to 10Mbps on the downlink and 3Mbps on the uplink,” Peter Yen, president of Tatung Infocomm, told the conference delegates in Singapore. “3.5G, on the other hand, typically offers 2Mbps on the downlink and 1Mbps on the uplink.”

Tatung Infocomm is the first of Taiwan’s six WIMAX licence holders to launch commercial service (27th April). Yen is confident that WIMAX will provide the network platform that will turn Tatung Infocomm into a ‘full service digital provider’ – which includes offering TV services – to compete against the island’s cable and DSL providers, as well as the 3G operators.

Delegates from Congress Asia – as well as members of the press – were also given the opportunity to see mobile WiMAX in operation at first hand. During a bus trip through an urban area of Johor Bahru (JB), Malaysia’s southern capital, various applications were demonstrated using P1’s mobile WiMAX network, which delivered between 5.6Mbps and 6.4Mbps on the move during the course of the demo (although the P1 demo people said the top speed they had achieved on the move was 9.6Mbps).

Using a dongle from Green Packet (Malaysia), a software and hardware provider for wireless networks – as well as being the parent company of P1 – bufferless video clips from YouTube and uninterrupted VoIP (over the P1 network) were both demonstrated on the bus. Live video streaming, using ‘PacketEyes’, a remote video surveillance application developed by Green Packet, was also showcased. The Intouch connection manager software, developed by Green packet for its USB WiMAX dongle, enables seamless connection between wifi, WiMAX and 3G networks without dropping the call session (P1 also provides a free wifi service in Kuala Lumpur), which Green Packet says is a unique aspect of its mobile broadband software solutions portfolio.

It was indeed an impressive demo, although it would have been more impressive if the bus were not moving at snail’s pace through JB’s rush-hour traffic, although I was assured by Green Packet staff that performance would not be impaired at faster speeds with base stations spaced no more than 1km apart in JB’s built-up areas.

Takeshi Tanaka, president of UQ Communications, which is undergoing mobile WiMAX service trials in Japan in preparation for commercial launch on 1st July 2009, was adamant that WiMAX would underline the shortcomings of the cellular mobile internet experience. “People are beginning to think that cellular internet is fake,” he says. “The browser is limited, the content and performance are limited, and so are the screen sizes. This is our opportunity to differentiate from the 3G style.”

Japan is home to a high amount of cellular internet users: 87 per cent of the country’s 106 cellphone customers regularly going online. If UQ could demonstrate that WiMAX provides a much a better mobile internet experience than the likes of NTT DoCoMo, and arm itself with a wide range of attractive devices, then it would put UQ in a strong marketing position. But to compete effectively against cellular, as it intends to do, the operator says it needs widespread coverage (eschewing the city-by-city approach of Clearwire). By the end of its fiscal year 2012 (31st March 2009), UQ plans to cover more than 90 percent of Japan’s population nationwide.

According to Tanaka, UQ has been achieving up to 16Mbps on the downlink and up to 3.9Mbps on the uplink since free trials of the service began in February 2009. The trials are taking place in Tokyo (all 23 wards), Yokohama and Kawasaki using some 600 Samsung base stations, which are compliant to WiMAX Forum Wave-2 Phase-2 specifications.

But if the Congress Asia delegates could agree that WiMAX mobile broadband was a much better performer than cellular, there was less clarity on how important voice would be to the WiMAX business case. Wayne Sun, CIO at Global Mobile, a WiMAX licence holder in Taiwan, says he is looking at the possibility of using VoIP solutions, such as Skype. Dr Teddy Huang, president and CEO of Vmax, another Taiwanese licence holder, says he is also looking at VoIP, but is keen to see affordable dual-mode cellular/WiMAX devices come onto the market as quickly as possible. The thinking is, of course, that customers will find it inconvenient to carry around two devices and so voice is seen as important by some WiMAX operators as a way to attract subscribers (rather than as a revenue stream in its own right).

P1’s Lai, however, is not convinced that Skype-like solutions, which use the public internet and have no QoS, can add much value. “Were not going after mobile voice market,” he says. “You are going to be competing with the GSM players if you do that, which have been in that market for many years. They also have the coverage.” P1 will, however, be offering en ‘end-to-end’ voice service over its WIMAX network by the end of this year, which will have some QoS attached. “If you provide a poor quality voice service, there is a danger you damage the brand,” says Lai.

Some concerns were also raised in Singapore about the high prices of CPE. “The upfront cost of CPE is still an entry barrier,” says Rizwan Tiwana, CTO at Wateen Telecom, an operator in Pakistan which is using 802.16e to offer fixed and nomadic services (it is prohibited by the regulator from offering mobile services). At currently over $100 per CPE unit, Tiwana would like to see the unit price come down to as low as $60 for Wave 2 compliant CPE. There are signs, however, that prices are coming down to this level. “I think it’s possible to get simple WiMAX CPE [no voice or wifi] below $70 by the end of this year,” says CC Puan, CEO, Green Packet Malaysia.

Global Mobile’s Sun also expressed ROI concerns about delivering high-speed access to feed bandwidth-hungry applications and the financial consequences of simply playing the role of a bit-pipe provider. “YouTube and Skype eat into [network] costs,” he says. “The big challenge is how to monetise [those applications].”

But the WiMAX mood in Singapore was upbeat, despite some of the concerns. Sun again: “WiMAX is proven, while LTE is still in the labs. Do you want to wait another three years for proper broadband?”  It was a sentiment repeatedly heard during the Congress Asia event.

But if Verizon can launch LTE in 20 to 30 US markets next year as it has said it will do, this might force a rethink of the time-gap between WiMAX and LTE. In the meantime, WiMAX appears to be enjoying some momentum, but it still needs a boost from the WiMAX ‘big guns’ to underline its mobile broadband credentials.

Clearwire eyes WIMAX operator stake in Taiwan

Clearwire is reportedly in talks with Global Mobile, one of six mobile WiMAX licensees in Taiwan, to strike up a strategic alliance. This may result in the US WiMAX operator taking an equity stake in Global Mobile, which is planning to increase its current level of registered capital (NT$1.13bn) by NT$1bn-1.9bn to help fund its WiMAX infrastructure rollout.

Although the six 2.5GHz WIMAX licences in Taiwan were awarded in July 2007 – three for the northern part of the island and three for the southern part – none has yet managed to launch commercial service. Lack of funding, combined with the economic downturn, has been the main reason for the delay.

Tatung InfoComm looks like it will be the first out of the WiMAX traps in Taiwan. Holding a licence for some counties in the southern region of Taiwan, the company, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Taiwanese conglomerate Tatung, says it will start commercial WiMAX service on the Penghu Islands on 27th April.

VMAX, buoyed by an investment commitment of NT$386m from Intel Capital in October 2008 – and whose licence covers a northern province – says it is on course to launch commercial WiMAX service in either Q2 or Q3 this year.

But Far EasTone, another Taiwanese WiMAX licence holder and the island’s third biggest mobile operator in terms of subscribers, announced last month it would take nearly a year before its commercial WIMAX service would see the light of day. “We are going to push out WiMAX on a commercial basis by the fourth quarter of this year, but will begin construction of the networks sometime soon,” Far EasTone president Jan Nilsson said in a statement at the time.

Motorola looks well positioned with Far EasTone. This week the mobile operator, whose WiMAX licence covers a southern province, announced that the US supplier had been awarded additional contracts to expand FarEastone’s WiMAX network in Taichung.

Motorola is to deploy its WAP access point portfolio, WiMAX base stations and to integrate the CSN (Connectivity Service Network), which includes AAA (authentication, authorisation and accounting) and HA (home agent) capability, which provides functions such as access control and billing.

FarEasTone slows WiMAX plans

“We are going to push out WiMAX on a commercial basis by the fourth quarter of this year, but will begin construction of the networks sometime soon,” Far EasTone president Jan Nilsson is reported to have said.

One of the reasons the company attributes to the delay is that it is ‘focusing on other projects’.

Far EasTone is one of six regional WiMAX licence holders in Taiwan, holding a 30MHz slice of spectrum in the 2.5GHz frequency band.

Although each of the island’s WiMAX licence holders has been forced to announced delays of some sort, primarily due to the economic downturn, VMAX is notably bullish end expects to roll out services this year.