Chip Vendor

Wireless startups garner $515.5M in February

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:59:57 -0400

It looks like we're seeing a shift in the tide in terms of where the VC money is going in the wireless industry. For so long, the bulk of investments were going to start-up mobile application-type companies. Rutberg & Co., however, indicates that some 30 companies, primarily device, semiconductor and carrier infrastructure sectors, in February received a combined $515.5 million in VC money.

Leading the way was TerreStar Networks, the satellite firm that is developing an integrated satellite and terrestrial broadband network that will incorporate what it calls "4G technology." The company pulled in $300 million. WiMAX chipmaker Sequans received $28 million while wireless USB chip vendor took home $24 million.

To read more about VC money in the wireless industry:
- take a look at this article from Unstrung

Related articles:
- TerreStar mulls 700 MHz bid Report
- TerreStar picks Accenture for 4G network Report
- Telsima, Sequans capitalizing on Indian WiMAX market Editorial

Is WiMAX a service complement for mobile operators?

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 06:59:58 -0500

A new report from In-Stat says WiMAX is more of a service complement than a competitive threat for mobile operators. The research firm says the debate can be broken down into two camps.

"One camp led by select equipment vendors with no stake in WiMAX has taken an either/or approach to discussing mobile WiMAX," said In-Stat analyst Daryl Schoolar. "Any gain by WiMAX comes at the expense of other 3G data technologies. In the other camp, infrastructure vendors like Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, and Nokia Siemens see a world where multiple mobile wireless broadband technologies will co-exist. In-Stat believes that the latter camp's view will prevail."

In-Stat backs this up for a few reasons. First, since the technology has been accepted by ITU, that move will open new markets for WiMAX. And mobile WiMAX will be more successful with laptops and other consumer electronic devices than in phones, offering new revenue opportunities for existing mobile operators.

Indeed, many WiMAX advocates have always touted WiMAX as a complementary technology. But when companies such as infrastructure giant Ericsson and leading chip vendor Qualcomm aren't in the WiMAX camp, WiMAX becomes a competitive threat to HSDPA and LTE.

Interestingly, Rupert Baines, vice president of marketing with picoChip, a leading WiMAX base station semiconductor company, says the market has already evolved to the point where WiMAX isn't a competitive threat since it is serving different groups of operators. He notes that most of the W-CDMA community will evolve to 4G LTE while the world's major CDMA operators, with the exception of Verizon Wireless, are going for WiMAX since we've seen Sprint, Japan's KDDI and Korea's SK Telecom deploy WiMAX. "UMB (the 4G path for CDMA) doesn't even count as the walking dead anymore," noted Baines. --Lynnette

Telsima, Sequans capitalizing on Indian WiMAX market

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 06:59:58 -0400

WiMAX infrastructure/solutions provider Telsima and chip vendor Sequans are two companies to watch during this week's WiMAX World conference in Chicago. The two have been relatively quiet but are now breaking out with some big announcements that are sure to lift their profile in the WiMAX industry.

Telsima, a relative unknown in the WiMAX industry, announced contracts with Tier-1 operators and said it will ship a total of 10,000 WiMAX base stations and 100,000 subscriber stations in 2007. Telsima revealed its equipment already is installed in commercial WiMAX networks for Tier-1 operators in emerging markets, including Tata-VSNL and Reliance Communications.

The company, with more than $100 million in equity and credit, is solely focusing on emerging markets, primarily India, with the goal of enabling operators in these markets to offer broadband wireless service for $10 per month. Burcak Beser, Telsima's chief technology officer, told me the company is winning these contracts for three primary reasons: Telsima is only focused on emerging markets, its StarMAX product line is cheaper than competitors when capex and opex are added together and Telsima's infrastructure is forward compatible and allows operators to add functionality incrementally.

Telsima's Trufle access service network (ASN) architecture is the main reason operators can offer WiMAX service at $10 per month, Beser said. The architecture is built around off-the-shelf switches and routers with no need for a mobile IP stack. The ASN architecture also supports both fixed WiMAX and mobile WiMAX subscribers. Not every subscriber needs mobility, said Beser, so an operator can save on opex costs by only providing mobile services to those customers who need it.

"Mobile IP is much harder to manage than a flat non-mobile IP network," Beser said. "If you are using the radio most optimally, then you don't pay the overhead of the core infrastructure."

Sequans is reaping the benefits of Telsima's momentum as the vendor is using Sequans' chips in its StarMAX product line, in both subscriber products and base stations. Sequans is also announcing today a deal with Alvarion to supply the vendor with mobile WiMAX base station chips. As I noted in August, Alvarion, historically strong in the fixed WiMAX market, is now gaining momentum in the mobile WiMAX market.

Sequans has been working in the shadow of competitor Beceem, which has scored some high-profile wins with Samsung and Motorola--two major suppliers for Sprint's mobile WiMAX rollout. According to Bernard Aboussouan, Sequans' vice president of marketing and business development, the chip maker's main advantage is its ability to deliver high data throughput with about 1/3 of the power of competitors, a key requirement for those operators wanting to save opex costs. To date, Sequans has 25 customers, with only about half announced.

Given the fact that the Indian market is set to become the largest WiMAX market in the world, we could very well see Telsima and Sequans gain some significant momentum.--Lynnette

Beceem taking cue from Qualcomm in WiMAX chip business

Lynnette Luna — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 06:59:58 -0400

Qualcomm has given the industry a nice blueprint when it comes to becoming the dominant supplier of CDMA and WCDMA chips in the industry. It's a blueprint that WiMAX chip vendor Beceem appears to be emulating, although minus the hefty intellectual property ownership.

Like Qualcomm, Beceem is working hard to stay ahead of the market when it comes to releasing generations of chipsets, giving device vendors no choice but to use the company's chipsets as a stopgap measure before they can come up to par with their own--if ever. Sound familiar?

To wit, Beceem is poised to sample its fourth-generation solution later this year--a feat that is far ahead of any WiMAX chip competitor in the market. As such, major device manufacturers Motorola and Samsung--two main suppliers for Sprint Nextel's WiMAX rollout that want to develop their own chipsets--have made agreements with Beceem. In March, Beceem announced that Motorola selected the company's MS120 mobile WiMAX chipset for use in certain models of its first-generation WiMAX customer premise equipment (CPE) and Beceem-supplied PCMCIA cards. Samsung selected Beceem in February as one of its major mobile WiMAX chipset suppliers, while Sanyo chose Beceem's BCS200 chipset as the foundation for its entry into the mobile WiMAX handset market.

"We've been field testing for 18 months, while most of the other WiMAX chip companies are now getting out in the field," David Patterson, vice president of marketing with Beceem, said in an interview. "We took the approach that we wanted to get out in the field as fast as possible so we could learn about OFDMA."

Beceem also took a cue from successful chip vendors in the mobile world. Early on, the company came to market with the strategy of providing both baseband and RF for mobile WiMAX. All of the chip companies left standing in the GSM, CDMA and WCDMA markets are those that have both the baseband and the RF.

Indeed, the WiMAX chip market could very well repeat history. Manufacturers in both the GSM and CDMA world embarked on their own chip strategies early on, only to spin off their chip efforts or abandon them entirely as companies with a single focus on developing chips began to dominate, especially in the more complex CDMA world. OFDMA is just as--if not more--complex than CDMA. Beceem could be a mighty beneficiary.

I would wager that once Qualcomm sees a significant market for WiMAX (it already acquired TeleCIS Wireless' system-on-a-chip engineering assets for OFDMA), Beceem will be a prime target. After all, Qualcomm is extremely familiar with Beceem's go-to-market strategy.--Lynnette