By: Adlane Fella

Please tell us a bit about ArrayComm; its founding, mission and products?

Founded in 1992, ArrayComm is the world leader in adaptive antenna technology. Our mission is to improve the service quality and economics of all wireless networks through the range, capacity, and coverage quality provided by our adaptive antenna software and solutions.

ArrayComm has applied its technology to widely deployed mainstream industry solutions such as WiMAX, GSM, PHS and WCDMA, and to the design of end-to-end systems optimized for particular applications such as our iBurstTM mobile broadband system.

Our IntelliCell^TM adaptive antenna solutions are commercially deployed in more than 250,000 base stations today, in 14 countries. Our 13 years of commercial experience in the field makes our team uniquely qualified to help customers integrate smart antennas into their wireless equipment and networks. We provide our customers with the highest field proven adaptive antenna performance while minimizing their engineering effort and technical risk.

We use the term "adaptive antennas" to cover a wide variety of techniques that exploit multiple antennas at the base station or at the client device, or at both. There's a lot of industry buzz at the moment about a technique called "MIMO." There are additional techniques that go by the names of MISO, MMSE, MRC, STC, STBC, ... a whole alphabet soup . The fact is, though, that each air interface and each set of service and economic objectives demand a different solution. Our experience allows us to determine which approach is most appropriate for a given problem and to then apply it successfully.

The company's headquarters are in San Jose, California, with engineering facilities in New Jersey, Korea, the UK and other locations to provide a local presence for our customers and partners. The company employs 70 people including 60 engineers.

ArrayComm earns revenues through licensing its IntelliCell software and the iBurst system. ArrayComm also manufactures and sells chipsets for integration into iBurst consumer devices like laptop computer modems.

Who uses your Smart Antenna products? Is it only cellular providers? Does ArrayComm currently have broadband fixed wireless customers?

Coverage and capacity of wireless systems have traditionally been a concern of cellular service providers: fixed, mobile, broadband and narrowband. They have been the historical customers for our licensees' products. ArrayComm technology is powering networks that serve over 40 million customers worldwide including PHS deployments in China, Japan and Taiwin; FWA networks in Asia and the Middle East; and iBurst mobile broadband networks in South Africa and Australia. We also have GSM and WCDMA licensees who have deployed products.

With the increasing ubiquity of wireless systems and as wireless is increasingly perceived as a necessary service, coverage and capacity are becoming consumer concerns, too. Looking forward, we see increased consumer awareness and demand for the improved performance that adaptive antennas can bring to end-user devices such as 802.11 access points and 3G data handsets. We expect our products to be increasingly integrated into consumer devices. Adaptive antennas have recently lead to significantly improved WiFi products, where they are referred to as "MIMO" or "pre-N" WiFi products, the latter being a reference to the 802.11n high-speed WiFi standard under development. Adaptive antennas are integral to that standard which is expected to provide raw data rates of roughly 500 Mbps.

Are all of your products designed (like in your iBurst) system to only work with licensed band radio products?

Our technology provides benefits to any wireless system, licensed or unlicensed. The performance improvements that result from the use of our smart antenna technology will vary depending upon the underlying protocol, but improvements in range, capacity and coverage quality always result as shown in the following chart. So, for example, both WCDMA and WiFi systems would benefit from our technology, although the level of benefits and the details of the IntelliCell solution would be different.

You recently joined the WiMAX Forum^TM, is this in part to expand your technology customer base outside of the 3G carrier space more?

We have been involved with the definition of the 802.16d and 802.16e standards for a long time. We have joined the WiMAX Forum as part of our overall participation in the emerging WiMAX market.

More importantly, we have established relationships with key companies in the WiMAX base station, subscriber station and chipset industries to enable their products with adaptive antennas. Our relationship with Intel is to collaborate in the standards and product arenas to establish high-performance and interoperable support for adaptive antennas in WiMAX platforms. In addition, we have an announced relationship with Posdata of Korea to enable their WiBro products with smart antennas, and there are other relationships that we hope to be able to announce soon.

Do your products support 802.16-2004 fixed wireless products or is it geared to the 802.16e Mobile WiMAX initiative?

Our product focus in 802.16 is on 802.16e/Mobile WiMAX. We have been active in both the 802.16d and 802.16e standards efforts, however, since the 802.16e standard builds on the 802.16d standard (i.e., 802.16-2004 as amended by the 802.16d corrigendum document being prepared by the IEEE).

Do you see WiMAX being disruptive to cellular providers business models or supportive---and why?

Potentially both, depending on a number of things. WiMAX can be disruptive if it brings more to the table than future 3G releases. WiMAX needs to bring better economics, ease of deployment and operating benefits than 3G if it is to be more than just an alternative air interface. If you look at the cost per Mb of data delivered by DSL, you will see figures around 2 cents per Mb. (See figure.) With 3G, the figures are 100 to 1000 times higher with mobile operators charging as much as 3 cents per kb. WiMAX needs to bring the cost of delivering data over the air closer to DSL figures.

From a radio performance perspective, WiMAX needs to provide greater coverage and capacity than the 3G alternatives. Adaptive antennas can help it do just that. (See figure.) Adaptive antennas can double the range and provide a 4x improvement in the throughput of WiMAX base stations as verified by a number of WiMAX equipment manufacturers and potential operators. This in turn reduces considerably the number of cell sites required. Adaptive antennas can be applied to all two-way wireless systems, but it is possible to extract greater benefits in 802.16e than in WCDMA or 1xEV-DO because adaptive antenna support is tightly integrated into the 802.16e protocol.

How does your smart antenna technology compare to that of other vendors such as Navini's Beamforming technology?

There are three differences. First, our technology has been applied to multiple air interfaces and is more widely deployed than any competitors adaptive antenna solutions for cellular systems. Second, we already provide for full mobility and seamless handoffs which our competitors have yet to demonstrate commercially. Finally, for air interfaces such as WiMAX, iBurst and PHS and our IntelliCell software provides channel re-use within the same cell, thus dramatically improving network capacity and reducing cost. (See Figure.) Simple beamforming does not yield this benefit.

What is the difference between your iBurst and IntelliCell^TM systems?

IntelliCell technology is a software-based solution that is licensed to base station manufacturers for integration at the baseband level with off-the-shelf hardware components. Since IntelliCell is based on the physics of transmission and reception, it can be integrated with any wireless air interface, including next generation wide-area networks and wireless LANs. ArrayComm has worked with licensees to optimize WCDMA, GSM, PHS, WLL, and now WiMAX networks.

iBurst is a complete system product for mobile broadband wireless access, sharing the same service vision of "anytime, anywhere, mobile" IP wireless connectivity with 802.16e. The centerpiece of iBurst is an air interface optimized for providing packet data with very high spectral efficiency and at very low cost. The iBurst access system connects to a standard broadband service core network with off-the-shelf billing, provisioning and traffic management tools.

The pure IP, end-to-end iBurst system is designed much like a cellular system, with base stations deployed throughout a coverage area and wireless modems or PC cards used by consumers to access the service. The system is architected to support the full range of IP applications in a mobile environment, including e-mail, virtual private networking, and high speed Web access, streaming video, gaming and voice over IP (VoIP). iBurst is now becoming a standard and moving into a model that opens the technology up for broader participation.

ArrayComm's iBurst products are baseband ASICs that power the iBurst user terminals and IntelliCell software for iBurst base stations. iBurst is commercially deployed in Australia and South Africa today. LiveDoor and PoweredCom recently announced plans to apply for spectrum for iBurst systems in Japan. Our licensees for iBurst currently include Kyocera Corporation of Japan and Dewell Corporation of Korea.

Where do you see the future of WiMAX and ArrayComm leading?

We have recently announced a partnership with Posdata, a Korean manufacturer of WiBro equipment. Korea will be the first country to showcase the nationwide deployment of WiBro, a variant of 802.16e. We will be trialing our software in Korea this fall with Posdata.

WiMAX is an important business for us. We've been involved in the industry from the outset, participating in the development of the standard and collaborating with the other players, to make sure that our technology will have a real impact on the WiMAX ecosystem and to have a product that scales across multiple customers. Our goal is to have lots of customers for WiMAX and to help each of them be successful with their products.

Marc Goldburg - Chief Technology Officer & Senior Vice President

Marc is responsible for all aspects of ArrayComm's technology research, development, regulatory and standardization efforts. He is one of ArrayComm's founding technical members and has played a leading role in the development and commercialization of the company's technology since its inception. Prior to ArrayComm, Marc's work was focused on communications and signal processing at Stanford University and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford, an M.S. from the University of Washington and a B.S.E. from Princeton University, all in Electrical Engineering. In 2002, Scientific American named him Communications Researcher of the Year in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the telecommunications field.

About the Author:

Adlane Fellah, MBA, is CEO and founder of Maravedis Inc. a world-leader in market research and analysis, specializing in BWA and VoIP markets. He is the author of the newly released landmark report "WiMAX and Broadband Wireless (Sub-11Ghz) Worldwide Market Analysis and Trends 2005-2010".
He is a leading industry analyst on wireless broadband technologies and recently conducted an extensive survey of regulators worldwide to build a unique BWA/WiMAX license holders & Spectrum database.

The author can be reached at afellah@maravedis-bwa.com