Interview with Sunil M Sanghavi, Senior Vice President Products & Partnerships for ArrayComm in the Basestation Newsletter
by Carole Mayhew - Senior Editor

 

 

1) What will be your approach in your presentation (Leveraging MIMO in Wide-Area Networks) on the Technology Day at the Dallas Basestation Conference 2006 to support our theme: The Impact of New/Emerging Technologies on Network Topology/Price/Performance?

 

Even though market conditions and operator needs vary across a wide spectrum, globally, and that the performance and economics of any wireless technologies will vary just as widely across the spectrum of conditions; implementing MIMO or derivations of MIMO will improve both economics and performance.  It can be misleading to spend too much time on discussions in the abstract of technology A vs. technology B.  It's better to start with some simple segmentation of what operators are trying to achieve, under what conditions, and try to identify threads of common technology fundamentals that are required to meet those needs.


2) How does WiMAX fit into the mobile landscape - is it a competitor or complementary to cellular networks?

As our first answer would lead you to expect, our vote here would be for “it depends.”  In markets with highly evolved cellular networks and high penetration of wireless voice services, WiMAX is likely to play a complementary role as the transport for applications beyond voice that demand much greater bandwidth.  In less-developed markets you will likely see VoIP-based services emerging on top of WiMAX as well, making it both a complement and competitor in those markets.

 

3) Has WiMAX been overhyped?

Mobile WiMAX, as defined now in the WiMAX Forum profile and certification wave processes, does represent a significant step forward for the industry in terms of raw performance promise.  The combination of OFDMA and multi-antenna signal processing (or MAS, the generic term for techniques that include MIMO and adaptive interference cancellation) will offer significant gains in range, client data rate, and capacity.  Operators deploying networks based on Wave 2 Mobile WiMAX will have a very interesting platform for new revenue growth.  The area where more caution might have been helpful is in expectations about the timing of these developments — new wide-area wireless systems take years to mature into commercially useful systems (witness 3G), and WiMAX will be no exception.

 

4) What is a realistic future growth path for WiMAX?

Based on everything we're seeing first-hand in the community of operators and manufacturers, we believe WiMAX will garner a material share of services beyond voice in the industry.  As was the case for 2G and now 3G cellular, multiple standards for these applications will persist, and WiMAX will become one of a handful of technologies in the mix.  There's too much innovation and quality work being put into WiMAX to count it out completely, and on the flip side there's too much momentum in the 2G/3G/3.5G environment to make it plausible that WiMAX could take over everything.

 

5) What do you think will be the main issues discussed at this year's event?

I think there will be a lot of discussions that get past the superficial and into the concrete — now that WiMAX is looking like a serious contender, I think a lot of carriers will be assessing how they might use it to their advantage.  The exploration of 3G evolution — in directions that enable carriers with significant 3G investments to reap the benefits of TDD, OFDMA, and MAS illustrated by WiMAX — will also get a lot of attention.

 

6) What are your primary concerns and challenges for 2007?

Our coming year is all about execution.  We have several major programs underway to incorporate our MAS software into base station and client device products for 3G, WiMAX, and mobile video markets.  We are very focused on helping our customers succeed through demonstrable performance differentiation and faster time to market for advanced capabilities.

 

 

Sunil Sanghavi is responsible for defining and executing ArrayComm's carrier marketing strategy, developing product strategy and overseeing standards group participation. Prior to joining ArrayComm, Sunil was the founding CEO of a wireless communications company that developed smart antenna-based WiMAX/WiFi/DVB semiconductors.