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IP Wireless joins the battle for 4G wireless between Flarion and ordinary UMTS

The launch of an IP Wireless service in Slovakia, and the launch of a Flarion service in the Czech Republic means that the rush to produce the definitive 4G wireless standard is on - and politics, as much as technology, could decide the issue.

T-Mobile is in both camps. Tomorrow, it will announce a service in Prague, using IP Wireless - which has the clear advantage of being part of the UMTS standard specification, as Orange's press release pointed out this morning when announcing its Slovakia tests of TDD.

But it has also announced "the world's first nationwide commercial mobile broadband service" using Flarion's Flash-OFDM network - which is already live in Bratislava and 19 other Slovak cities.

No details are yet available about the Czech experiment, but it is known that T-Mobile and IP Wireless are due to make an announcement tomorrow, in Prague.

Behind the scenes, there are too many variables to make this test definitive.

Key to the optimism of those setting up the Slovak Flarion service, is the fact that the network will not be hamstrung by having to use the UMTS standard 2.1 GHz spectrum. Instead, the old 450 MHz band is being recycled - allowing the service to operate far more economically, because of in-building penetration issues. The number of cells needed to cover an urban area with 2.1 GHz wireless is far higher than for 450 MHz, because the 2.1 Gig signal is strongly attenuated by buildings or other visible obstructions, requiring nearly line-of-sight access to a cell mast.

The actual technical advantages, when it comes to speed, will have to wait for the pudding to be proved.

The claims being made for HSDPA or IP Wireless by Orange in the Slovak Republic are exciting: "Mobile internet using these technologies can reach speed of 14 Mbps, that is incomparably faster than the competing technologies available today..." and "UMTS TDD technology from IPWireless, in a 5MHz unpaired channel, which enables peak user speeds of 5 Mbps with latency less than 50ms. Future development of this technology will increase speeds to 13.5 Mbps."

That's considerably more than what Flarion is claiming for Bratislava - or at least, so it seems.

However, on closer examination, it's clear that the proposals aren't that different.

The claim of 14 megabits is qualified: "HSDPA can reach peak sector speeds of up to 14 Mbps under ideal conditions." The Flarion claim suggests: "Customers of T-Mobile Slovakia's service will experience mobile data speeds of 1 Mbps average in the downlink and up to 256 Kb ps average in the uplink." The key difference is between the words "peak" and "average" - and the actual difference, from the user point of view, may be less startling.

Both IP Wireless and Flarion technologies offer one advantage over HSDPA and the matching HSUPA technology which will eventually be deployed - and that is low latency.

The latency of data over WCDMA networks in Europe has been a disappointment; one secret report showed that Web pages could not be served any faster over WCDMA than over GPRS (2.5G GSM standard) "because the number of transactions involved in receiving a single web page can easily be more than 20 or 30, with each transaction involving latencies of a significant part of a second."

Both Flash OFDM and TDD are packet switched networks, with latencies down to ISDN levels - good enough to play Quake on, if you had the money.

Politics: easy. Flarion is now owned by Qualcomm. To the distress of Qualcomm Board members, the implacable opposition by European comms authorities to working with the corporation remains uneroded, even by the large shareholding Qualcomm has taken in several European and Eastern European telcos. The company is seen as an employer of intellectual property lawyers first, and a technology provider second.

This perception won't have been helpfully affected by Qualcomm's purchase of Flarion. It is believed that the company was considering buying either IP Wireless or Flarion, and made its choice of Flarion, not necessarily because Flash-OFDM is likely to be the superior product technically, but because Flarion looks to be far more able to defend its patents than IP Wireless, whose technology is already an open standard.

"As Governments across Europe open up new and existing spectrum for mobile broadband," said Ray Dolan, [left] CEO of Flarion, "so network operators are looking for new technologies that will allow them to deliver new and differentiated IP services."

The key to his comments is the spectrum availability. There is lots of unused 450 MHz and 600 MHz band spectrum coming up for re-assignment around the European continent, as the old analogue phone networks are taken out of service. Whoever gets that new spectrum is likely to have a crucial advantage in the setup phase, simply because one 450 MHz mast can cover a large urban area, which would require dozens of 2.1 GHz cells to achieve the same coverage.

But also buried in his comment is the other critical acronym: IP - in the sense of Intellectual Property as well as Internet Protocol. Qualcomm is rushing to ensure that Flarion's technology becomes an accepted standard, rather than a proprietary secret - but even if the IEEE endorses it, it's still not clear that a majority of European telcos will willingly go down a route which makes them even more beholden to Qualcomm IP lawyers than they are today.

The perception that the third IP - IP Wireless - is more "open" may sway judgements when Governments are asked to authorise technologies over the next two years.

Technorati: UMTS, UMTS TDD, Flarion, IP Wireless, Flash-OFDM