Subject: [NEXTEL-1] March is crunch time for Mobile-Fi

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2004 23:42:34 -0500

March is crunch time for Mobile-Fi
By Wireless Watch
Posted: 08/03/2004 at 12:18 GMT

This week's IEEE meeting will be critical for the future of the
proposed 802.20 Mobile-Fi standard for IP-based mobility. The group
will elect a new chair, and the choice is widely expected to determine
the speed of progress of the specification and its potential to
develop alongside the increasingly overlapping mobile WiMAX, 802.16e. 

Joe Barrett, vice president of marketing in the EMEA region for
Flarion, one of the key supporters of 802.20, said: "The speed of
progress of 802.20 depends on the voting for the new chair and who
that person is backed by." 

Political coup 

Last time such an election was held, last June, the politics holding
Mobile-Fi back became clear. At the June IEEE meeting, senior
executives from Lucent and NTT DoCoMo became heads of the 802.20
Working Group, replacing executives from Flarion, Navini and smart
antenna pioneer ArrayComm. 

Navini claimed that the new chiefs, particularly NTT, had staged a
"political coup" to wrest control from 4G technologists and ensure
that 802.20 did not gain ground against either 3G or 802.16e. WiMAX
presents a slightly lower threat to 3G than 802.20 because it is
mobile within a metro area, rather than supporting hand-off at high
speeds like Mobile-Fi. 

According to Navini and its supporters, members of 802.16e and
representatives from cellular companies attained voting rights and
used them to install their own candidates and sabotage the process. 

Such in-fighting and conspiracy theories abound in standards bodies,
but they do hold back both technological progress and confidence in
evolving standards. Barrett claims "the standards issue is not slowing
us down," but agrees that "the industry wants to have a standard. The
operators will decide how that plays out, if they have the money and
the spectrum they have the power now". 

Burst of confidence 
Flarion's burst of confidence rests on its recently-announced trial
with Nextel, and older pilots in South Korea. It says it is gaining
ground with operators in other areas too, even Europe, where
regulatory issues complicate the picture. Flarion will go to great
lengths to make its Flash-OFDM technology appealing to the large
operators. "We can work to be 3GPP compliant if the operators ask for
it," said Barrett. 

However, 802.16e is advancing more rapidly than 802.20 and with more
aggressive backing from powerful companies like Intel and Nokia.
Recently, Navini, which once shunned WiMAX, said it would support 'e'
as well as Mobile-Fi and Nextel is trialling 802.16 as well as 802.20,
and has made it clear it will only back technologies that have a clear
route towards a standard. 

All this makes the March meeting a pivotal one for 802.20 and for
Flarion perhaps more than any other of the Mobile-Fi supporters. Its
Flash-OFDM is more truly mobile than the implementations of Navini and
other players like IPWireless, which gives it an advantage with
cellular operators - but no place to run in the fixed wireless world,
if it fails to demonstrate the convincing path to a standard that
cellcos will demand.

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/69/36078.html

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