AWTG White paper on Mobile WiMAX Potentail and Challanges

The number of voice users is approaching saturation in most of developed countries, and incumbent operators are therefore not expected to be able to increase their revenues only by offering voice and SMS. The only option left for them is to offer their customers a range of broadband services and applications, particularly similar to those already offered by fixed Internet service providers. Incumbents are nevertheless still looking for killer broadband applications to increase their revenues, akin to conventional business models. However, the era of the “killer application” has already passed, and the era of the “long tail” in successful applications has begun. There will be no new “killer applications” for mobile users; instead, it is expected that there will be a large number of smaller-scale services and applications, which together will continue the blossoming of revenues for operators and service providers. Such services and applications include:

• High Speed Access to the Internet
• Mobile TV
• Peer-to-peer applications
• Mobile advertising
• Location-based social networking
• Location-based dating
• Collaborative social/corporate services and applications

How AWTG sees the interworking of networks in the Future

Next Generation network concepts is all about how to deliver ubiquitous services through multiple access technologies in order to reduce the cost of per megabytes of data delivery. The goal here is to support new services that no access technology could individually handle in an efficient and low cost manner. Existing multiple access technologies are cellular, WLAN, broadcast and WiMax. Many cellular operators have already interworked their cellular networks with WLANs (WiFi networks) in order to leverage the benefits of licence-exempt spectrum usage and higher capacity and QoS enhancement. Their subscribers also benefits from access to a range of broadband multimedia services such as video streaming, file downloading and access to the Internet. So far, operators taking this path have adopted the lower degrees of coupling between their cellular networks and WLANs only providing a single bill to their subscribers. However, for full roaming between these two access technologies, tighter degrees of coupling are needed in order to support a single sign-on (one authentication key) and to support handover.