Also on the standards front, there has been news from the WiMAX Forum, guardian of the technology which lost the mobile broadband war to LTE (though it retains activities in vertical sectors like aerospace and potentially wireless backhaul). The Forum says development of WiMAX Advanced Release 2.2 standards, which focuses on integration of the two TDD systems, WiMAX and TD-LTE, in one RAN, to support migration or coexistence.
The Forum said its technical working group (TWG) has begun to develop initial drafts of Release 2.2 stage 2 and stage 3 network and air interface specifications. The goal is to enable “WiMAX/TD-LTE RAN deployment, in adjacent-channel and co-channel operation, by a single operator, using a common or partially common core network’. The specs should be finalized by year end. The Forum is targeting the release at WiMAX operators which need to add TD-LTE or Wi-Fi while maintaining services for existing customers, and the key contributors have been Huawei, Samsung, KDDI, UQ Communications, KT and Telrad. In future, there is likely to be full haromonization of the next generation WiMAX Advanced with the LTE-A roadmap.
Japanese WiMAX operator UQ has been granted an additional block of 20MHz of spectrum adjacent to its current 30MHz in 2.5GHz, which will enable it to launch a new ‘WiMAX 2+’ service in October, reaching theoretical peak download speeds of 110Mbps. It then plans to adopt new techniques such as carrier aggregation, 256QAM and 8×8 MIMO to reach 1Gbps speeds by 2017.