4.3 WiMAX Development Prospect in Asia (Great China)

China Mainland

The situation of WiMAX in China Mainland is also complicated. Actually, in China, TD-SCDMA is the main developing technology and standard, after long time research and test, TD-SCDMA is a sophisticated and suitable for China market. If WiMAX want to develop in China, it has to face the competition from TD-SCDMA which is a self-developed technique.

During the WiMAX Forum Asia in this April, ZTE of China mentioned that with the improvement and development of mobile broadband network, people will have more fantastic experiences including radio monitoring, VoIP service and so on. And they would like to use WiMAX technology to support these service. In 2006, WiMAX chip was already embedded in the laptop to realize the protability. Considering its low cost and high compatibility, WiMAX will become a powerful and strong standard in China in market to satisfiy the requirement of customers because customers do not need to wait for the real 3G, 4G service.

Actually in 2007, according to serveral sources, the Beijing Olympic Committee had authorised China Mobile to provide WiMAX sevices during the Olympic Games in 2008. It was a really contested issue at that time and it also showed that WiMAX seemed have great prospect in China. And China Netcom will have the right to supply only WiFi services even it also want to have the right to provide WiMAX services. After that, many news said WiMAX will be given up by Beijing Olympic Committee, but now, most wireless network had been set up. The wireless broadband MAN basically is combined by WiFi Mesh+ and WiMAX technology.

A lot of cities in China are preparing to establish the wireless metropolitan access network such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing. Most of them would like to choose WiMAX combing TD-SCDMA. This is a acceptable and useful way because both technologies are similar to each other in some degrees such as they use TDD, etc. However, the coexistence of WiMAX and TD-SCDMA in China is because of the Beijing Olympic Game. No one knows after Beijing Olympic, what is going to happen about WiMAX and TD-SCDMA. My view is that these major standards in China will continue to compete with each other and try to occupy as large market as possible. If we look at the frequency problem in China, it's most probable to use 3.5GHz for WiMAX, but the government still did not announce this issue which made the operators and companies stopping in the development of WiMAX.

So in China Mainland, ostensibly, it seems that WiMAX will be boost rapidly, however, in depth, it's still need to wait for the opportunity maybe after 2008.

Taiwan

Taiwan is also a large market for wireless network. Actually, Taiwan always want to be a leading role in the matters of adopting and boosting WiMAX in the world. To be frank, Taiwan is famous for its information technology and it owns largely to state sponsored incentives and related ICT product manufaturing capability. Taiwan is considered as the top semiconductor and other ICT manufacture. In WiFi issue, it has more than 90% of world market share. M-Taiwan (Mobile Taiwan) program means Taiwan will focus on WiMAX acceleration and development. According to its advantage on chip manufacturing, it is more obvious for them to decrease the cost on WiMAX. This ecosystem is suitable for Taiwan to develop WiMAX for market spreading. Taiwan is moving steadfastly with its plan of WiMAX spectrum and sticking to its original plan to issue a number of regional licenses. This will allow green-field operators to participate in the M-Taiwan program to join the ranks of established operators in providing WiMAX services. Several large scale WiMAX networks are expected to be created these two years, making it easier for these networks to provide commercial services in the near future. Additonally, the government is takeing innovative WiMAX deployment approaches into account to create wireless cities and put in use in High Speed Railway system. The M-Taiwan Program will be positive for some other countries and areas who may want to realize or adopt WiMAX standard.

Mr. Jen-tang Wang, the CEO of Acer, is persistanting to support and popularize WiMAX technology in Taiwan. His idea is to combine WiMAX technology, equipment, network system, operators, market together to accelerate the development of WiMAX in Taiwan so that Taiwan can become the leader of WiMAX all around the world. He also said there existing a lot of problems in the market, Taiwan is possible to use its advantage in hardware manufacture to drive the progress of WiMAX. He advised Taiwan need to cooperate with international company such as Clearwire, Sprint Nextel, Intel, etc. to solve many technological problems. In total, Taiwan concerns WiMAX very much and WiMAX will have wonderful prospect in Taiwan.

Practically, different countries have different situation and attitude for WiMAX, but overall, WiMAX will continue its steady development in Asian countries.