Lower cost

As the broadband wireless market continues to grow, the industry should expect to benefit from cost reductions enabled by volume deployments and economies of scale. Portable and mobile applications have a very strong track record for accelerating volume, therefore it is expected that mobile deployments of 802.16e will bring cost points down below solutions engineered solely for fixed applications using 802.16d.

Additionally, major chip set manufacturers have announced that 802.16e will be the premier standard for WiMax applications, pointing to a substantial embedded base of consumer products with 802.16e support. These same chip sets used in laptops and handhelds can be leveraged in the manufacturing of indoor- and outdoor-fixed customer premise equipment. It becomes quickly apparent that 802.16e offers the critical advantage of allowing the operator to ride a downward trending cost curve.

Scalable system bandwidth

With 802.16e, WiMax makes enhancements to the physical layer by employing Scalable Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). The ability to scale system bandwidth while maintaining constant symbol duration provides greater commonality in equipment components and offers operators the advantage of being able to deploy today and grow their system bandwidth tomorrow at a lower cost and reduced network impact.