Stephen Lee, general director of Samsung's product planning group, highlights this year's key successes.
Our Wimax solutions are being commercialized and under trial with 57 operators in 36 countries, including Clearwire in US, UQ in Japan, Yota in Russia, Mobily in Saudi Arabia and YTL in Malaysia. We have more than 30% market share. More than 4.8 million subscribers use our mobile Wimax solutions as of September. That number is expected to reach over seven million by the end of the year.
In October 2010, we successfully demonstrated Wimax 2, the next-generation mobile Wimax - based on IEEE 802.16m - with a down link speed of up to 330 Mbps.
What are the key trends that have supported your success?
Our multimode base stations can support any access technology, such as CDMA, W-CDMA, Wimax and LTE, by adding the relevant channel cards. The remote radio head can be shared among different technologies as well. This allows operators to choose an effective solution to handle the data traffic explosion. We also provide managed service and remote monitoring/analysis of networks for operators that do not have experience in operating these networks.
What has kept operators interested in Wimax as the network evolution moves to LTE?
We've seen an explosion in mobile data traffic in recent years, with more than 100% growth every year. Wimax was designed for data-centric communications while on the move - it's the most cost-effective solution to meet this soaring demand in mobile data communications.
The first mobile Wimax commercial service launched in 2006, and currently more than 160 service operators in 76 countries are providing or preparing Wimax services.
Wimax has already established a robust ecosystem, with groups of vendors ranging from chipset and component companies to device manufacturers and infrastructure suppliers providing diverse types of equipment and devices. The diverse range of devices includes smartphones, netbooks, USB dongles, PC cards, CPE and Wi-Fi Routers. The number of devices exceeds 200.
What are the biggest challenges going forward?
While we expand across the globe, we are also creating new opportunities in vertical markets such as the public sector, educational organizations and large-scale business enterprises. Some examples are smart grids, and healthcare and emergency networks using PTT. After smartphones appeared in the market, data traffic has expanded exponentially while operators' revenue is increasing linearly. Samsung aims to provide operators solutions to offload data traffic in macro networks in cost-effective and innovative ways.
Can you outline your roadmap for 2011?
We are preparing Wimax 2 solutions that support bandwidths up to 40 MHz and 8T8R technology. From 2012, operators can have Wimax 2 commercial products.
Wimax 2 will provide more market opportunities and we will explore these, targeting green-field operators, which were not considered as traditional telecom operators but have just come into the mobile data service area, and vertical (enterprise) market opportunities. As well as legacy telecom operators, emerging operators from the broadcasting, ISP and cable industries will also be our business targets.
We are also preparing LTE solutions, which share more than 70% of the core technologies with mobile Wimax. We've already provided LTE commercial products to MetroPCS, which began the US's first LTE service in September, and entered into a contract with Cellular South. In December Sprint selected Samsung as a key equipment services supplier for Network Vision, the next evolution of the Sprint network, at a cost of $4-$5 billion.
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