Broadband Wireless Access Trends and Challenges
A.P.S. Khanna · 1999
The first phase of wireless era dealing with telephony has been an enormous success. Greater than 400 million wireless phone subscribers in the world and increasing at a rate greater than a million a month is a testimony to the importance of the wireless communication for mankind. Recent explosive growth of the Internet has clearly exposed the bandwidth limitations of the telecommunication infrastructures. The new challenges are taking us into a different battleground of data communications. Broadly wireless applications have multi dimensions. While one dimension is voice, data and video applications, the other dimension deals with mobility versus fixed. Wireless cellular phones’ success is undoubtedly based on the need for mobility while communicating. These cellular infrastructures are presently being used for data applications providing tens of kbps capacity to the end user. Next generation cellular systems commonly known, as 3G systems will move this capacity to 128kbps mobile access speeds. These systems are expected to have capability of providing up to 2Mbps under stationary conditions. However, these systems are being primarily designed for mobility and may have limited application in extremely cost competitive fixed end -user market.