WiMAX Growth Set To Fill The Need For Speed
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Broadband wireless access technology WiMAX, is set to gather strong momentum in the Asia Pacific region with WiMAX services revenues estimated to grow from US$58 million in 2007 to $5.46 billion by 2012, according to the latest report by IT research company Springboard Research—a compounded annual growth rate of 148 per cent for that period.


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And the total market for WiMAX services in Australia is estimated to grow to $AUD123.6 million by 2012.

And according to SMB WiMAX vendor BigAir, the growth of WiMAX-enabled portable devices and PVR technology will push the growth of WiMAX technology from a zero base to astronomical figures.

Intel for example is offering WiMAX connectivity as an option on its new platform, and although this is not expected to see this until 2009, when the company assumes that WiMax will become a widespread solution.

Jason Ashton, CEO of BigAir notes that his company is targeting the SMB sector- from 10 to 500 employees, and those that are currently using ADSL broadband.

“Fixed WiMAX is a broadband replacement technology, one where we have seen 70 per cent growth in the past year alone”.
“Our biggest growth is coming from the likes graphic designers, advertising agencies and photographers who need fast speeds and large download caps for the transferring of large size digital files- basically a situation where ADSL just doesn’t cut it”.

This is because that although WiMAX download speeds are about same as ADSL2+, the upload speeds is where the main differences lie with theoretical speeds of 1 Gb being quoted.

Also the education sector one is where WiMAX is having an impact as Ashton points out,  “where you need P2P and a large pipe for a significant number of people to simultaneously download and share large files”.

 

And according to Eric Hamilton, CTO of consumer WiMAX vendor Unwired, the future for mobile WiMAX is even rosier.
“If we look at mobile phones, they started from a base of zero, to now have something like 102% penetration in a 10 year period – this is what we are looking at as a model for mobile WiMAX take-up”.

 And although mobile WiMAX has not yet been properly launched in Australia, the process is close to completion and notes Hamilton ” it will become an enabler for many applications such as unified communications, instant messaging and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) connectivity”.

In terms of hardware, Motorola is the leading WiMAX vendor community in Asia Pacific and all up, the top five WiMAX vendors in Asia Pacific are Motorola; Alcatel-Lucent; Samsung; Nortel and Cisco.