With all the ongoing talk about network collaboration between Sprint and Clearwire, you could be excused for assuming that WiMAX is an Undeniably Good Thing; hell, Motorola and their partners in Thailand called the recent trials there “outstanding”. So it comes as something as a surprise to hear that the previously rapturous Garth Freeman, CEO of Australia’s WiMAX-based Buzz Broadband, has blamed the technology for the close of his network. Calling WiMAX a “disaster” that “failed miserably”, Freeman used his presentation at a conference in Bangkok to flag up concerns with “non-existent” non-line of sight performance beyond 2km, indoor performance that decayed when 400m away from the base station, and latency rates reaching 1,000ms.
Freeman pointed at poor latency and jitter leading to unacceptable VoIP performance (a shame, since that was one of Buzz Broadband’s key marketing points) and ending with the relatively understated warning that “WiMAX may not work”, skewering technology providers and fellow carriers along the way with accusations that the technology is “mired in opportunistic hype” and supported only by “second-tier vendors”.
Buzz Broadband is now using a mixture of wireless mesh and more traditional cellular services, and Freeman attempted to make an argument for his preference of HSPA technology to the largely pro-WiMAX audience. Ironically, the CEO was a speaker at the conference last year, when he spoke positively about WiMAX (although criticising indoor reception, which he this year revealed had caused arguments between Buzz and their hardware suppliers, Airspan).
[via SlashDot]
HELLO!!!?? One small little dinky ISP in Australia is saying WiMAX doesn’t work and everyone is suppose to believe it? There are hundreds of fixed WiMAX deployments in the world… and Airspan, as #1 provider of certified fixed WiMAX equipment in the world, provides MANY of them. Nobody else is complaining! It’s a well respected and well regarded company! One has to use their common sense… why is this guy complaining when nobody else is? Because the technology works! Why didn’t it work for him? Well I suppose if I had a small wireless ISP company and it looked like OPEL was going to produce a national WiMAX network… I would be a little nervous. I’m not saying this is the case… but think about it… his business would be dead. So how do you stop a national WiMAX network from being deployed? Say the technology doesn’t work! Is it also possible they are using old infrastructure equipment to handle the high speeds of WiMAX? Has anyone gotten Airspan’s comments on this?
Airspan released this today in defense of Buzz Broadband CEO’s attack on WiMAX.
Marketing Release
Date: 3/24/2008
Re: Buzz Broadband
Public Statements Concerning WiMAX and Airspan by the CEO of Australian WISP, Buzz Broadband
This week, at a WiMAX conference in Thailand, the CEO Buzz Broadband of Australia railed at the audience that WiMAX was a “disaster”. CEO Garth Freeman made several disparaging remarks about the range of WiMAX systems and their ability to carry VoIP traffic.
Buzz Broadband deployed Airspan MicroMAXd, ProST, and EasyST equipment to around 200 users, the same equipment that is installed in many of the 100 or so other Airspan WiMAX deployments. In addition to broadband services, Buzz Broadband intended also to offer VoIP services to its subscribers. Mr. Freeman’s recent statements highlighted two complaints: the range of the solution, and the quality of service (QoS) capabilities for voice traffic.
With regard to range, although Airspan offers both micro-cell and macro-cell base station solutions, Buzz Broadband opted to go with the less-expensive micro-cell base stations in order to reduce cost. This was a well understood tradeoff of cost vs. range. In support of larger cell radii, particularly in support of indoor desktop CPE devices, Airspan offers the HiperMAX base station, which offers the best link budget in the industry for an 802.16d-2004 solution.
Regarding QoS for VoIP, MicroMAX certainly offers appropriate QoS for wire-line quality voice support, but, as an access technology, can only do so for the portion of the link between the user device and the base station. In the case of Buzz Broadband, we know that there were significant under-provisioning issues in the core network which connected the Airspan equipment to the Internet. Very early in the relationship, Airspan technical services determined that Buzz’ backhaul network was considerably under-dimensioned (again to save cost) and lacked sufficient QoS, and that these factors were the direct cause of VoIP quality issues in the network. Airspan even went so far as to offer to fund a third-party analysis to help Buzz understand these issues. Both Airspan’s help and third party assistance were refused by Mr. Freeman.
At Airspan, we pride ourselves on our customer service and excellent products. In the case of Mr. Freeman’s company Buzz Broadband, we exhausted all avenues to help this customer re-engineer their core network and resolve these service issues. In the end, with Mr. Freeman rejecting help from the outside, the technical and financial resources of Buzz Broadband were not sufficient to deploy a functioning network to the satisfaction of its customers. We regret the distress caused by Buzz’ poor network architecture decisions to the customers in need of Broadband Internet access and VoIP services.
It is unfortunate that Mr. Freeman felt the need to broadcast his difficulties in such a public fashion. WiMAX has proven to be enormously successful from a technical standpoint, and Buzz’ allegations, even when so easily dismissed, are a distraction to the WiMAX industry and ultimately a disservice to the millions of satisfied broadband wireless access consumers worldwide.
If you should have any questions regarding this or any other concern, please don’t hesitate to contact me at Airspan on 561 893-8643 or dbyrne@airspan.com.
Best Regards,
Declan Byrne Chief Marketing Officer Airspan Networks, Inc.
Buzz Broadband was operating a fixed WiMAX service that used 3.5 GHz spectrum. It requires line-of-sight; Sprint is working with mobile WiMAX in 2.5Ghz spectrum which does not require LOS and has better building penetration.