Persusahaan Manufaktur Perangakat Telekomunikasi CISCO akhirnya akan lebih fokuspada produk IP Core Network dan perangkat jaringan EDGE dan LTE, serta meninggalkan produksi perangkat WiMAX.

Berita lengkapnya ada dibawah ini:

Company confirms that it will discontinue designing and building new WiMAX base stations and will instead focus its mobility efforts on the IP core and network edge.

Cisco confirmed the change in its mobile strategy during a call last week. "We have decided to focus our efforts on delivering value in the edge and core of the network, and direct future investments on the access side to femto and Wi-Fi technologies," says Sai Subramanian, Director of Product Marketing for Cisco's Wireless Business Group. "We will discontinue building and designing new WiMAX base stations, but will continue shipping existing equipment and supporting existing customer networks."

Cisco entered the WiMAX RAN (radio access network) business through its $330 million acquisition of Dallas based Navini Networks in October 2007. Navini was a pioneer of so called "beamforming technology" that provides additional quality and signal strength by concentrating radio signals in the direction of the receiver - providing additional coverage compared to non-beamforming solutions. Recent studies have shown that beamforming enabled base stations can reduce the number of towers needed by half, providing significant cost savings to WiMAX operators.

Beamforming technology is currently supported in the current mobile WiMAX 802.16e profile and will be included in future revisions of WiMAX (802.16m) as well as LTE. While many vendors have plans to include the technology on their roadmaps, to date few vendors except Cisco have commercial equipment available.

Departing the WiMAX RAN business will allow Cisco to focus on the IP core and network edge where it's a more dominant player. In October 2009, Cisco acquired Starent Networks which offers network agnostic mobile gateway solutions that support a broad range of access technologies including CDMA, GSM, UMTS, WiMAX, Wi-Fi and LTE among others. Over the past few years, Starent has racked up an impressive list of customers including Vodafone, Verizon, Sprint, KDDI and China Unicom, and was selected to provide its technology in Verizon's upcoming LTE network.

While leaving the WiMAX RAN market, Cisco remains an important player in the WiMAX space in providing core and network edge equipment. "We expect to continue to be a significant player in the WiMAX market," says Subramanian. "We will continue to be big players in the WiMAX space, just not in the access part of the network."

Cisco is following a trend in the industry in which base stations are becoming a smaller percentage of the overall capital budget. While costs are also coming down, the intelligence of the network is migrating into the core and edge of the network, and base stations are becoming "dumb radios" relative to other parts of the network. Under this scenario, operators will leverage many different types of access technologies including WiMAX, LTE, Wi-FI, 3G depending on a number of factors including spectrum owned, subscriber density, devices, applications and business models.

While exiting the macro-level base station market, Cisco will continue to pursue smaller radio access technologies including femtocells and Wi-Fi. Femtocells are essentially wireless access points used by mobile operators to improve network coverage in small areas and off-load data traffic from their network. Femtocells can use a wide range of technologies and leverage a broadband connection to route the connection back to a carrier, bypassing the operator's macro-cell towers. While femtocells could conceivably include WiMAX or LTE technology, no decisions have been made at this time according to the company. "As we examine the market, we will certainly look at all different types of technologies required and where there is an area we can delivery significant value, rather that is WiMAX, LTE, 3G, etc.," says Subramanian.

While Cisco was not one of the top WiMAX RAN providers, its departure may none the less be seen as a psychological blow to the industry. Cisco's exit leaves Motorola, Alvarion, Samsung and Huawei as the dominant WiMAX RAN vendors in the industry. Cisco follows Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks who also left the WiMAX market to focus on other access technologies such as LTE.

While WiMAX detractors will surely use this as opportunity to show waning support for the technology, this is not un-similar to other telecommunications markets like CDMA, where a handful of infrastructure providers serve the market. In some ways, industry consolidation is to be expected and is an indicator that the market is maturing.

While the WiMAX equipment market is projected to be $6-$8 billion over the next 3-5 years, it may have been too small relative to Cisco's other markets and opportunities. Although it was involved in around 50 WiMAX networks from an access perspective, it was never in the top 3-4 vendors in the WiMAX RAN market and paled in comparison to its involvement in other parts of WiMAX networks. The company is involved in most all WiMAX networks in some form and is the leading IP core provider for Clearwire's U.S. nation-wide network build out.

A number of factors may have attributed to the slow adoption of the Navini/Cisco WiMAX base stations. Although fewer base stations are needed due to beamforming technology, the per-unit cost of the base stations were more expensive than competitors which often put them at a disadvantage in RFPs. Although research showed that operators could actually lower total network costs by utilizing beamforming, many of the decision makers were looking for cheaper base stations, especially in the race to put up networks quickly.

Given their complexity and longer sales cycles, the WiMAX macro base stations may also have been more of a challenge for Cisco's channel partners, who are used to selling more established products such as Wi-Fi with higher margins and shorter sales cycles. While many WiMAX networks today support advanced features such as MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) antenna technologies, few operators are using these capabilities. Most operators will eventually utilize more advanced MIMO and beamforming technology, but it will take time to implement these capabilities.

Cisco will continue to be active in the WiMAX Forum and the WiMAX Open Patent Alliance according to the company."We are supportive of the WiMAX market and will continue to have WiMAX solutions and serve those customers," says Andy Capener, Director of Service Provider Marketing for Mobility at Cisco. "We are just now going to now focus our efforts on where our expertise resides."

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