WiMax licence spur for Thailand

[Nick]

WiMax experts have suggested Thailand issue national licences to attract investment from operators, while Intel Malaysia is the first country to introduce embedded Wi-Max notebooks in the Asean region.

Garth Collier, Managing Director Asia Pacific, WiMax at Intel Corporation, said Thailand and Vietnam are still at the allocation frequency stage for WiMax services, which promise to accelerate wireless broadband adoption in Asean.

In Thailand, the National Telecommunication Commission has to allocate the existing frequency available for the WiMax services and the NTC should consider issue national Licences to attract service operators.

Moreover, it is suggested that the licences should last for to 10-15 years, enough time to allow operators to gain a return on investment. And the licence should mandate deployment service obligation in order to protect licensees from wasting national frequency resources due to inactivity.

In the Thai context, WiMax can support fixed wireless broadband services in rural areas, while mobile operators can invest in this technology at a lower cost by using its existing infrastructure.

"WiMax is competing with Long Term Evolution, which I see taking two years to full commercial implementation in some countries," said Collier.

"Compared with 4G, WiMax is gaining global momentum, with millions of subscribers and more than 500 WiMAX networks in 147 countries."

He continued that Intel also has wireless chipsets that will enable laptops to support Wi-Fi and three versions of WiMax global, at 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz and 3.5GHz.

Currently, Intel supports WiMax as it sees value in its price performance for wireless broadband connectivity, but it could support other wireless technology that supports user mobility.

To date, lots of mobile devices support WiMax and Collier believes that with increasing volume and greater economies of scale of the WiMax module, the pricing of a WiMax module compared to Wi-Fi only could come down to less than $10 (324 baht) in a few years.

Debjani Ghosh, director, Intel South East Asia, added that Packet One Networks (Malaysia), or P1, which is the national WiMax service operator in Malaysia, has already launched Asean's first WiMax-ready 4G laptops.

Currently, six major OEMs - Acer, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, MSI and Toshiba - have introduced notebooks and netbooks based on Intel Core and Atom processors, and featuring the dual-mode Intel Centrino Advanced-N + WiMax 6250 embedded solution.

This will encourage rise in the availability of WiMax-ready 4G laptops in other markets around Asia Pacific as the technology reaches mass market.

Michael Lai, CEO of Packet One, said WiMax-ready 4G laptops will change the way people stay connected to the Internet.

The service has close to 40 percent of the Malaysian population covered and expect to get the return on investment by end of next year.

About the author


Writer: Suchit Leesa-nguansuk
Position: Reporter


ที่มา: bangkokpost.com