Dale’s Web Log

Cisco Systems Inc. is now looking at the prospects of several of its networking divisions introducing WiMax products, according to industry sources, reversing a sometimes combative stance on the emerging wireless technology from the company.

“The wireless, cable, and Linksys groups are all looking at WiMax,” a source tells Unstrung. “These have different motivations and different products.”

Cisco will face the eternal conundrum that it always faces when entering a new wireless market, the source adds: “The question will be, do these internal groups do the work… or who will they buy?”

Another source, however, says at least some of the development is internal and the company is already working on WiMax. This could result in additional WiMax capabilities for its municipal networking offerings.

In the past, WiMAX Forum member Cisco has pooh-poohed the technology’s chances of success as a wide-area wireless access technology. Most notably, when CTO Charlie Giancarlo said the business case for WiMax was “not compelling” in November 2004. The firm has softened its stance a little since then but still has a white paper on its site explaining why it won’t build WiMax base stations.

The company’s official stance on WiMax is still fairly muted. “Cisco always looks at different wireless technologies,” allows Ben Gibson, director of mobility solutions marketing at the firm, but he adds: “WiMax is certainly not nearly as far along in the market as wireless LAN.”

Cisco, however, would by no means be the only major networking company to change its position on WiMax as the market evolves. Just recently, Qualcomm Inc. bought into mobile WiMax, while Ericsson AB decided to get out of the market and concentrate on cellular 4G updates.

Certainly there is more support for WiMax from mobile operators and other service providers now than there was in 2004 or 2005 — when Cisco first got sniffy on WiMax. In the U.S. alone, Clearwire LLC and Sprint Nextel Corp. are working on multi-billion dollar WiMax rollouts through 2008 and beyond.

— Dan Jones, Site Editor, Unstrung

Sprint wants to shrink WiMax base stations even further so that they can be used to enhance data transfer speed and capacity in the home.

Sprint has already revealed some of its plans to ensure decent WiMax coverage inside larger buildings with picocell WiMax radios for campuses, offices, shopping malls, and conference centers with picocells. The Reston, Va., operator also has an RFP out for what it calls “Low Cost Internet Base Stations” but most others in the industry call home base stations or “femtocells.” (

A home base station, or femtocell, is a low-cost, low-power 3G cellular radio system that users can put in their dwellings to boost bandwidth and coverage and enable new applications such as fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) in the home. Such mini-base stations have become more interesting to vendors as operators have started to take the devices more seriously, both as an alternative to WiFi hotspots or as a complementary technology.

Sprint has already made it clear that it anticipates that in-building coverage will be an important aspect of its WiMax rollout. “Femtocells are on our radar,” says a spokesman for the operator.

The spokesperson, however, wouldn’t be drawn on any specifics about particular RFPs. “As a matter of policy we don’t comment on RFPs,” he says.

Sprint is said to be looking for several hundred thousand of these mini-base stations along with smaller — but still significant — numbers of picocell-scale equipment for its WiMax deployment, which is at a testing phase right now and due to go live in many major cities in the U.S. in 2008. CDMA and EV-DO support could also be part of the specifications for these appliances.

The problem for vendors wishing to compete will be pulling together these disparate networking technologies. Indoor wireless specialist RadioFrame Networks Inc. has been upfront in its plans to bring a WiMax home base station to market. The company has already worked with Nextel on indoor systems and must be considered a strong contender for any new contracts.

AirWalk Communications Inc. , Airvana Inc. , and Samsung Corp. are all in the running since the three vendors are established in the CDMA business. Samsung also has the WiMax chops and experience, especially now that it has been involved in early deployments in South Korea.

Silicon could be key in enabling a multi-radio mini-base station. Qualcomm Inc. has already started to express an interest in developing chips for this type of application. Major players such as Texas Instruments Inc., as well as smaller companies like PicoChip Designs Ltd. , are already working on dedicated femtocell chipsets. Meanwhile, RadioFrame is extending its own OmniFrame silicon to support WiMax.

Insider analyst Brown, author of the recent “3G Home Base Stations: Femto Cells & FMC for the Masses” report, says that no matter what happens with Sprint’s WiMax-related work, femtocells are one of the new hot technologies in the world of wireless.

“A major operator will roll out a femtocell deployment this year,” says Brown. He predicts that either a CDMA operator in the U.S. or a European operator that has a serious GSM footprint but few 3G networks will be first.

Nokia expects to start selling mobile devices using WiMAX Internet technology in early 2008 WiMAX allows very high-speed Internet access from laptops, phones or other mobile devices over greater distances than previous technologies. Nokia’s closest rival in the handset market, U.S. based Motorola, also plans to bring its first WiMAX enabled mobile phone to the market in 2008.

Intel, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola all support the open-standard WiMAX as an alternative wireless broadband Internet connection alongside third generation mobile telephony networks, on which Internet access can be slowed if networks fill up with voice callers.

“Nokia is dedicating significant research, development and intellectual property to WiMAX and supports efforts in making it a global broadband standard. The combination of WiMAX broadband technology and Web 2.0 services offers people an enriched high-speed Internet experience free from the desktop PC. Nokia plans to bring its first WiMAX enabled mobile device to market in early 2008.” Nokia said in a statement.

WiMAX will make wireless broadband much cheaper to deliver—up to 10 times cheaper than current third-generation cellular telephony networks.

The radio spectrum for WiMAX networks is rented out by regulators at more affordable prices than for 3G mobile phone spectrum, and WiMAX equipment vendors claim the infrastructure and handheld devices will be cheaper than 3G systems.

Oct 24, 2006 - By W. Gardner Courtesy of TechWeb News

Scientists at MIT are close to putting together the pieces of a miniature gas-turbine engine with hopes that it could replace today’s battery technology and be used to power laptops and cell phones in the future.

The researchers, who are spread across different disciplines at MIT, hope to get the pieces to work together by spring. Eventually they hope to implant a tiny engine–the size of a quarter–in silicon. Considering the current recall of millions of laptop batteries, the MIT project takes on heightened importance.

“It’s very complicated to make a self-sustaining engine,” said Stuart Jacobson, principal researcher, in an interview Tuesday. The parts and functions that must work together include a compressor, a spinning turbine, a bearing system, and a combustion chamber.

The researchers turned to etching silicon wafers when they realized traditional welding and riveting procedures wouldn’t work. The overall discipline is called microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The effort brings together researchers from the university’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the MIT Gas Turbine Laboratory, Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and the Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems.

The development team has stacked six silicon wafers on top of each other after the wafers have been prepared through a special etching process. The miniaturized parts include turbine blades that spin at 20,000 revolutions a second, according to an MIT press release. Ten watts of power are produced by a tiny generator.

Noting that the project is funded by the Army, Jacobson said a hoped-for early application would be a small engine in a “stand alone box” that a soldier could wear to power equipment like night vision gear. Batteries currently in use by soldiers are relatively heavy and often run out of juice too soon.

Jacobson is hopeful that a field test can take place in two or three years. After that, “an engine on a chip” could power laptops and cell phones. He envisions the technology being used one day to produce small rocket engines and small lasers.

MIMO is a wireless communications technology that actually uses multipath propagation to its advantage. What is Multipath? I’m glad you asked.

After transmission, radio signals bounce and reflect off objects along their path to a receiver. As a result, many different paths to a particular receiver are possible - each arriving at the receiver at slightly different times. Traditionally, these signals arriving at different times would actually interfere with one another and prevent the receiver from being able to recover the original signal.

MIMO on the other hand, uses these varying paths to carry even more information than previously possible. Essentailly, each different path to the receiver is used to carry different parts of the signal. At the receiver, each part is recombined by the MIMO algorithms into the original signal. Think of it as a form of Inverse Multiplexing. Start with a 100Mbps data stream, separate it into 10 different 10 Mbps data streams and transmit each stream at the same time - only along different paths to the receiver - where the 10 Mbps streams are recombined into the 100 Mbps stream.

MIMO is the basis of the IEEE 802.11n specification for WLANs having at least 100M bit/sec throughput. Additionally, MIMO, in conjunction with OFDM, are the bellweathers of the 802.16 wireless standard.

MIMO doubles the spectral efficiency compared with that of current WLANs. The maximum data rate for 802.11g and 802.11a networks is 54M bit/sec, though actual throughput is closer to 20M to 30M bit/sec. Current MIMO techniques can boost raw WLAN throughput to greater than 100M bit/sec. Some even tout systems that can support up to 250 Mbps.

Here is a listing of some currently available products that support MIMO technology.

• D-Link Super G with MIMO Wireless Router DI-634M - wireless router ( DI-634M )
• Airstation Mimo 240MBPS Wireless Cable/dsl Router with Aoss
• TRENDnet 802.11G MIMO Wireless Router
• Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 Wireless-G MIMO Performance Router and Access Point