MicroBusiness - Cellular Industry Competes for Broadband Business

Our previous column on WiMAX business prospects included a graph of the mobile WiMAX competitive environment. Many different versions of such graphs exist. What these graphs have in common is that they are all populated by a progression of cellular systems toward ever-higher broadband capabilities. The 4G target peak data rates agreed upon in ITU-R Working Party 8F for "Systems Beyond IMT-2000" (renamed "IMT-Advanced") are "up to approximately 100 Mb/s for high mobility such as mobile access and up to approximately 1 Gb/s for low mobility such as nomadic wireless access". The cellular industry is pursuing mobile broadband development toward these objectives along two distinct 3G/4G branches, one evolving from WCDMA and the other from CDMA2000. The former is spearheaded by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), and the latter by 3GPP2.