WiMAX commercial use in China is fully launched and a 280 million yuan purchase order is released

JasonYoo

WiMAX commercial use in China is fully launched and a 280 million yuan purchase order is released [Copy link]

After a long period of concept hype, WiMAX finally began to take root in the Chinese market.

It is reported that Guangdong Netcom has signed a contract with two equipment vendors to purchase WiMAX (802.16d) equipment. According to the overall plan of Guangdong Netcom, if the contract can be fully implemented, the total amount will reach 280 million yuan. Guangdong Netcom is one of the WiMAX test and commercial pilot projects of China Netcom Group. Similar commercial activities will be gradually carried out in Jiangsu, Shanghai and other places in the future.

Some industry experts said that under the promotion and impact of China Netcom's WiMAX commercialization, the domestic wireless broadband access market will face a reshuffle.

In terms of market positioning, the 280 million yuan equipment purchase order is the total amount of Guangdong Netcom's multi-phase WiMAX network construction plan. According to the plan, Guangdong Netcom will invest nearly 100 million yuan in WiMAX wireless network equipment, and the remaining amount will be used for the purchase of background network equipment. Guangdong Netcom

's WiMAX network construction has adopted a step-by-step implementation strategy. According to relevant sources, the initial investment in WiMAX network construction should be around 10 million yuan, and the construction task can be completed before the end of this year. According to the final goal plan, Guangdong Netcom's WiMAX network will be deployed in various prefecture-level cities in Guangdong Province.

According to the reporter's understanding, Guangdong Netcom has a more specific idea for the operation and positioning of the WiMAX network, which is to target low-end enterprise users and high-end individual users.

Its internal analysis believes that this is mainly due to the operator's limited frequency band resources. At present, WiMAX product equipment is basically developed and designed based on the 3.5GHz frequency band. After several rounds of bidding for the 3.5GHz frequency band in China, each basic telecommunications operator has only obtained 10M bandwidth spectrum resources, which is somewhat stretched for the operation of WiMAX and is not conducive to the high data bandwidth capability of WiMAX. Therefore, enterprises and high-end users with stable business volume and small total demand should be the positioning choice of WiMAX in the current market environment.

The purchase of large orders is still in suspense

. China Netcom attaches great importance to the high-bandwidth data access capability of WiMAX, which is mainly due to its lack of last-mile access capability in the southern region of China. Guangdong Netcom is one of the pilots of China Netcom Group in the south. Its testing work started in April 2005. It adopted the form of testing with multiple manufacturers separately to compare the manufacturers. People who are familiar with the internal situation said that Guangdong Netcom still has two concerns, which will directly affect the final implementation of the 280 million purchase order. First, the initial customer acceptance of the services carried by the WiMAX network is not yet completely certain; second, Guangdong Netcom does not have available frequency bands in some cities, and still needs to be approved by the national spectrum resource supervision department.

At the same time, an unnamed person revealed that according to the overall deployment of China Netcom Group, in addition to Guangdong Province, Netcom companies in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai and other places have also carried out WiMAX testing, and "in terms of scale, it is larger than Guangdong Netcom."

This is indeed a big deal for equipment manufacturers. Several other operators also take WiMAX lightly. China Telecom is currently carrying out testing work in nine provinces and one city in northern China; China Mobile's testing work has been carried out for more than half a year; China Unicom is also about to enter the formal network testing phase.

But overall, among domestic operators, China Netcom has shown unprecedented attention to WiMAX. Some experts believe that in the case that the industry is generally not optimistic about China Netcom's independent 3G launch, using WiMAX as a differentiated competitive weapon for the future is a good strategy for China Netcom.

Expecting scale effect

However, the release of the 280 million yuan equipment purchase order did not satisfy the promoters of WiMAX.

A manufacturer believes that Guangdong Netcom's equipment purchase this time cannot be said to be the most ideal result. For WiMAX manufacturers, the shipment of hundreds of thousands of sets of equipment can achieve scale effect, while for operators, each city needs a network scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of lines to better popularize WiMAX applications. "The network scale planned by Guangdong Netcom can only be regarded as a start." The person told reporters. The

reporter also learned that the industry standards for WiMAX are also being formulated. The 7-member standard drafting group led by the Telecommunications Research Institute of the Ministry of Information Industry has currently submitted the industry standard draft for WiMAX (802.16d) interface technical requirements, equipment technical requirements and equipment testing methods. Analysts believe that the introduction of the WiMAX industry standard will greatly promote its commercialization process.

On the one hand, it is the strong promotion of equipment manufacturers, and on the other hand, the formulation of industry standards. All factors that are conducive to the commercialization of WiMAX are advancing rapidly.

In fact, according to the reporter's understanding, the network communication companies in several provinces in southern China have already tested other broadband wireless access technologies, including 3.5G technology products based on private protocols, and some provincial and municipal operators have also deployed a certain scale of trial networks, but due to various reasons, they ultimately did not form large-scale operational capabilities.