Wireless Observer wireless technology observer

The WiMAX market has entered a stage of sustained growth.  Operators have moved from the slide deck and vendor selection stage to the more demanding jobs of building networks and signing up customers.  A couple of years ago, the focus of operators’ attention was on the fundamentals - which type of equipment worked best and how fast the price of subscriber units would decrease.  Today operators are asking vendors for a wider variety of devices that will enable them to increase the capacity and reach of their networks, and new base station form factors that will give them the flexibility they need as they expand their networks.  They are also experimenting with new services and new ways to reach their subscribers, and to make the services more attractive. The feedback from subscribers.  The fast growth in subscribership and traffic per user demonstrates that WiMAX operators have got the attention of subscribers in their markets.  Yota in Russia has signed up 500,000 subscribers in less than a year of operation, with most subscribers from two cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg.  In Malaysia, P1’s major challenge is to roll out enough base stations to meet demand.  P1 has 180,000 subscribers and is the country’s second-ranking broadband operator in terms of net subscriber adds.  In the US, Clear was close to reaching the one million subscriber mark at the end of 1Q2010, signing up almost 100,000 subscribers per month.  Equally impressive has been the growth in per-user traffic, with many operators in emerging markets reporting monthly average usage levels over 10 GB, well above the 7 GB average traffic generated by Clear subscribers in the US. The present and the future of WiMAX.  We have conducted a survey of WiMAX operators to illustrate market progress to date and as the basis for our forecast of how the market will evolve during the 2009 to 2014 period.  The survey covers Mobile WiMAX (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE] 802.16e, also simply referred to as WiMAX in the rest of this paper) operators with over 1,000 subscribers worldwide, split into six geographical regions. This paper reports on subscribership, service revenues, usage models, devices, traffic, base stations deployed, and plans to move to the next generation of WiMAX—WiMAX 2.  Based on IEEE 802.16m, WiMAX 2 is set to become an International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT) Advanced Fourth Generation (4G) technology. Key Findings: - By 2014, we expect to see more than 90 million subscribers worldwide, with 47% of them in Asia Pacific. - Service revenues will reach $24 billion, with ARPUs at $22 per month, with the highest ARPUs in North America and the lowest in Asia Pacific. - WiMAX operators will increasingly push mobile services and devices.  Today 66% of subscribers use WiMAX as a fixed broadband service.  By 2014, only 47% of subscribers will.  The rest will increasingly use WiMAX as a mobile service, using dongles (31%), embedded laptops (7%), or phones or other devices (27%). Click here to download the complete whitepaper