WiMAX made simple – what is Clearwire actually doing?

Clearwire announced today that it has finished its selections for suppliers for the WiMAX network it is building across the US. The final company to be added was Huawei, which will be joining a list of companies including Motorola and Samsung. Each company on the list will be providing physical components for the 4G network. But given the number of companies involved in the endeavor, and the predictably impenetrable language of the press release, I decided to write up a friendlier version of what each company is actually involved in – and even what WiMAX actually means.

What IS WiMAX?

It’s an evolution of wireless communications and broadband Internet. It basically allows for much larger wireless networks than WiFi to be created. Your average WiFi network is a couple of hundred feet (at best) – whereas a single WiMAX network can broadcast up to 50km from a tower, covering an entire city. Since it has such a huge broadcast radius, it has great potential for portable Internet connections – like smartphones and USB modems. It will also be a lot faster than WiFi.

Ok. So what will all these companies be doing?

The technical description is “4G network infrastructure supplier” – basically, they will be helping Clearwire to build its American 4G network. Because of the nature of WiMAX, there’s an incredible amount of information that needs to be moved around. We are talking about a single network the size of city here. One that should be able to wirelessly handle data at the same speed that a wired connection can. So each aspect of the network is being handled with great care by the companies involved.

Let’s have a look at the breakdown of what companies will be involved, and what they will actually be doing:

• Huawei, Motorola and Samsung will all be supplying Radio Access Network (RAN) equipment. Basically, this equipment allows the core network (Clearwire, in this case) to communicate with all the devices on its network via a radio link. This includes equipment like base stations – these are the actual “cell towers” that transmit and receive signals for your phone.

• Cisco is handling Next-Generation Networking (NGN). NGN is a new way of handling mobile services, and it allows them all to be bundled into data packets. This means that voice, SMS, data and any other service provided over mobile can be treated as a data service. For more details on why this would be a good thing, check out the very similar service announced by Deutsche Telekom, which we covered yesterday.

• Ciena will be handling base station switching. WiMAX network areas are huge – they not only comprise a large number of base stations, but also different types of base stations for dealing with different types of network. Being able to move a mobile device connection from station to station quickly and smoothly is essential. Fast Base Station Switching (FBSS) has pretty much been developed just for WiMAX.

That's a WiMAX base station there, folks

• DragonWave is on board for the networks microwave backhaul. A single connection between a base station and a modem or mobile device won’t carry that much data. But the base-station will be communicating data from vast numbers of devices back to the core network – and that’s backhaul. That mass of information is usually transmitted by actual copper wire, and it’s traditionally one of the most expensive and difficult parts of running a mobile network. Microwave backhaul is a cheaper, wireless way of handling it. In fact, it’s where WiMAX got its name. WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access.

What we think?

Press releases often throw around terms like “backhaul”, “base station” and “radio access network equipment” with abandon. Now, I’m sure that a hard-core techie would have some kind of fit on reading my over-simplified explanations above, but I reckon it helps to give a broad idea of what all these huge corporations are actually doing.