Pennsylvania Wireless Association

Just last month, Taiwan reported a massive jump in the number of WiMAX subscribers in the country, almost 85 percent growth for the six months ending November 2011. However, the world is changing fast to LTE, and the government of Taiwan is now getting attention for continuing to endorse and support WiMAX.

The government said it would drive an increase in development of WiMAX applications and would help the country's six WiMAX operators to expand their networks. As a rule, the government claims to be technology-neutral in its awarding of 4G licenses, and plans to remain that way as new licenses become available next year, according to local reports from Taiwan.

Taiwan was caught at the center of technology controversy last year, when Intel began to wind down its support for WiMAX, but the government insisted it would push ahead with ambitious plans for local WiMAX-related deployment and manufacturing. It does not appear as though the government is staunchly supporting WiMAX and turning completely away from LTE, but the attention Taiwan is getting for backing WiMAX may reflect just how quickly LTE is becoming dominant.

For more:
- read this Tech Eye story

Related articles:
Taiwan reported 130,000 WiMAX subscribers late last year
The GSMA said last year Taiwan needed to move toward LTE

Some mobile backhaul companies have been struggling in the past year, as the bandwidth demands expected to be created by LTE have taken longer to arrive than they had planned. Still, others in the backhaul game are continuing to expand and upgrade the backhaul facilities to handle the explosion they know is coming.

This week, mobile backhaul provider Zayo Group said it had reached its goal of getting 2,000 unique cell towers on-net with its fiber-to-the-tower offering. The company now offers about 100 Gbps in overall bandwidth to more than 3,000 tower tenants in 46 markets. Zayo also said it is close to activating in six new markets, and is in the process of building more than 500 new towers.

Meanwhile, wholesale network operator Phonoscope is upping its network capacity with help from Ciena. The carrier is deploying the vendor's 6500 Packet Optical Platform with WaveLogic technology to help Phonoscope create a network of 25 multi-gigabit Ethernet rings that will be able to support 10 Gbps, 4o Gbps and 100 Gbps capabilities for backhaul and other applications. Phonoscope also will be deploying Ciena's 5410 and 5150 Service Aggregation Switches, and 3930 and 3931 Service Delivery Switches.

Phonoscope said a major wireless carrier already is planning to purchase 10 Gbps capacity to move aggregated LTE mobile backhaul traffic.

For more:
- see this Telecom News Now post on Zayo
- check out this FierceTelecom post on Phonoscope

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Backhaul company FiberTower has been flailing
Mercury Wireless went with wireless backhaul

The migration to LTE has not stopped Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) from introducing two new WiMAX products, something that Clearwire partner Sprint (NYSE:S) already has said it will no longer do.

Clearwire this week announced two new hotspot products to go with the network that is on its way out. The Clear Hub Express is a combination WiMAX hotspot and Wi-Fi router to enable easy connections for homes and offices. It costs $99. The other new product is the $124 Clear Spot Voyager, which link up to eight devices with WiMAX. It has six hours of battery life.

Sprint said last month that it would no longer support WiMAX in new devices, sending the message that it is all about LTE from now on. Clearwire's move is a reminder that the LTE migration may not exactly happen overnight. It also might be encouraging for current WiMAX customers to hear that they still have choices for new devices, even though WiMAX future is limited. Whether or not they feel the current WiMAX network is worth continuing to buy new devices for is a whole other story.

For more:
- see this Verge story

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Clearwire and China Mobile are working together on LTE
Clearwire started thinking about LTE four years ago

We've only just started our second month of 2012, and some carriers are only just starting their initial LTE deployments, but there is already a good reason to look forward to next year: LTE Advanced, recently authorized by the ITU. As carriers start deploying LTE Advanced sometime in 2013, the difference compared to what we know of LTE right now should be breathtaking. LTE Advanced has more has more than triple the downlink speed and more than five times the uplink bandwidth of today's LTE. Article

Cisco Systems has released its Aironet 3600 Wi-Fi access point, a four-antenna multiple-input/multiple-output (4x4 MIMO) unit with three spatial streams that is aimed at expanding coverage for enterprises. The 4x4 MIMO trend has been developing at the service provider level and in the consumer market for some time already.

The 802.11n product is being released at a time when much of the Wi-Fi sector has been talking about the coming 802.11ac standard, but Cisco points out in reports about the new product that 802.11ac will probably happen first at the consumer level.

The Aironet 3600 also supports 802.11r, the fast roaming standard for improving hand-offs from one access point to another in a large coverage area. The company said the new product includes ClientLink 2.0 beam-forming capability, which delivers greater downlink performance to all of the devices within range of an access point, rather than just those that are closest to it.

The product also includes the vendor's CleanAir technology, which scans multiple channels to look for the cleanest, most secure channel to use for transmission.

These features are likely to appeal to corporate enterprises pursuing bring-your-own-device strategies, allowing them to let more devices on their networks with some assurances that performance and security won't be compromised.

For more:
- read this InfoWorld post

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The industry has been pursuing 4x4 MIMO in recent years
Quantenna also has been a champion of 4x4 MIMO