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Analyst Handicaps WiMAX Market, Picks Early Leaders
By Mark Hachman

http://www.extremewimax.com/article/Analyst+Handicaps+WiMAX+Market+Picks+Early+Leaders/159790_1.aspx

September 9, 2005Forward Concepts, known for their expertise in the DSP space, has entered the WiMAX forecasting market with a report predicting that the technology will be worth $2 billion in 2009.

Since the technology is still in its nascent state, the firm predicts that WiMAX chip revenues will total just $5.4 million this year. Still, Forward Concepts also predicted that traditional Wi-Fi WLAN products would generate $5.2 billion in 2005 sales alone, evidence that the WiMAX market still has a ways to mature.

While some analysts have wondered whether WiMAX will end up competing with HSDPA and other next-generation cellular technologies, Forward Concepts analyst Carter Horney has taken the opposing view.

"We view WiMAX as complementary to both Wi-Fi and 3G cellular," he said in a statement. "Fixed 802.16d systems can provide backbones for Wi-Fi hotspots where DSL or cable is unavailable or impractical. When emerging 802.16e provides a mobility WiMAX capability, it will augment the Wi-Fi infrastructure that will remain dominant for several years."

Since the technology is still rolling out, Forward Concepts analysts were reluctant to pick the market leaders. All of the chip vendors are still sampling, milling about in the paddock before the WiMAX race begins.

However, "the PHY/MAC chip leaders on the CPE (client) side of the current 'fixed' point-to-multipoint market, defined by IEEE 802.16-2004 (but popularly known as 802.11d) are clearly Intel and Fujitsu Microelectronics," Forward Concepts principal analyst Will Strauss wrote in an email. "However, Canadian Wavesat and French Sequans are very aggressive and probably next in line. Of course, they are all at the sampling stage."

"On the base station side, UK-based picoChip is probably out front with their programmable picoArray chip, which they claim can morph from today's 802.11d (point-to-multipoint) standard to the future 802.11e (mobility) standard simply through software changes," Strauss added. "They claim more than a dozen design-ins at present. It was picoChip's product in the base station that Intel demonstrated their CPE chip (code named "Rosedale") with. Altera claims to have FPGA design-ins in WiMAX base stations, too, as chronicled in the last paragraph of the writeup. Xilinx is probably in the running, too."

"I fully expect Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, among others, to enter this market, too, aiming mostly at the high-volume CPE side of the future mobility WiMAX (802.16e) market, which will be much bigger than the 16d market," Strauss noted.,