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

BINNEH S MINTEH
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

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