Italy Shows That WiMAX Isn't "Just Like Wi-Fi Only Better"

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Rapallo is a seaside community of 34,000 people on the Italian coast east of Genoa. According to the Wikipedia, Ezra Pound lived there in the late-1920s and 30s, and it is where Friedrich Nietzsche conceived his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Rapallo is also the home of Andrea Rodriguez, a 44-year-old developer of communications software. Rodriquez wants at least one-third of Italy's WiMAX spectrum at 3.5 GHz reserved for license-free use by not-for-profit networks built by local public authorities and community groups. His online petition "WiMAX Libero!" has already gained over 120,000 signatures. In no other country have so many individuals expressed support for a radio band dedicated exclusively to license-free community networks.

But despite Rodriguez's petition and its impressive popular support, Italy's ministry of communications recently announced plans to auction licenses for all 150MHz of the available WiMAX spectrum in January 2008.

Mixing their metaphors slightly, WiMAX Day said the ministry "had to jump through numerous hurdles" to get the rules approved. That suggests behind-the-scene political pressures, which could explain why the resulting rules have some controversial features.

Several potential bidders note that it is unclear if the licenses allow for mobile use. If they do, then the regulatory agency AGCOM says further unspecified technical restrictions may apply. That increases uncertainty about the value of the licenses and the cost of the needed infrastructure.

Meanwhile, NGO Anti-Digital-Divide complains that the number of licenses is too small to ensure sufficient competition among licenseholders and the auction rules guarantee that the highest bidder wins: there will be no comparison of different promises of quality of service, deployment speeds, bandwidth prices to end users, no consideration of past performance, etc.

Francis Bollorino, who works on Genoa's Digital City project, pointed out to La Repubblica that the coverage area of every WiMAX license cuts across administrative boundaries. That means any city wanting to develop a municipal WiMAX network must bid against their neighbors and large commercial firms to win the right to operate within their own jurisdiction, and winning will oblige them to serve neighboring cities, whether they want that responsibility or not.

Perhaps the most serious challenge to Italy's WiMAX auction rules comes from Reggio Calabria's MGM Productions srl (which bought a WiMAX license in Germany last year). MGM went to court to complain that the ministry's rules are biased in favor of the large incumbent carriers like Telecom Italia and Vodafone. A first hearing in this case is set for 22 November. If the court agrees with the complaint, the auction may be postponed to allow time for the rules to be changed.

The significance of these issues extends far beyond Italy. Last September, Eric Bangeman wrote an article for Ars Technica entitled "WiMAX backers positioning 802.16e as an alternative to municipal WiFi." Reporting from the WiMAX World trade show in Chicago, Bangeman observed "a fair bit of trash-talking about municipal WiFi from supporters of WiMAX who believe that 802.16e... has the potential to provide the kind of user experience and business case that municipal WiFi lacks."

Many other supporters of municipal wireless seem to regard WiMAX as "just like Wi-Fi only better". Wi-Fi does have shortcomings that make it far from ideal for wide-area coverage - severely limited range, poor hand-off support, no right of noninterference, etc. Such shortcomings have become clearer as more municipal projects are launched, producing a quest for close substitutes. WiMAX - with its greater range and higher throughput - has obvious appeal.

But as the Italian experience makes clear, WiMAX is a wireless technology with a very different character, mainly because of licensing. In theory WiMAX can operate in unlicensed spectrum. But today's IEEE standards make frequency sharing difficult so hardly any manufacturers make WiMAX equipment for unlicensed bands. The cost of each base station is so much greater than for Wi-Fi that network developers tend to want licenses to protect their investment. Brad Casemore describes WiMAX as "a telco technology in Internet garb."

The problem with licensing is that it drastically reduces a city's choices among equipment and service providers. It limits the business models that can be agreed with network operators, and makes the city dependent on the commercial goals and good will of the licenseholder. It can also reduce the freedom to reconfigure systems in light of operational experience and complicates the deployment of new nodes for special needs (emergencies, large temporary events).

I am not aware of any cities planning to bid for the UHF frequencies released by the migration of TV from analog to digital, even though these are ideal for low-cost urban broadband. Most elected officials seem to believe that they cannot outbid the commercial telecom and mobile operators. They may be right about that. Others believe they should not even try. Even in Europe there are few city-owned TV stations as precedents, so acquiring a UHF license simply is not on their radar screen. Too bad. Italy's WiMAX licenses last 15 years and they aren't freely transferable. So if some grouping of cities later realizes that UHF would have been perfect for their broadband needs, it may be too late.

Unless the rumor published in the Telecom: Italy blog last December proves correct, and the Government does decide "to triple the bandwidth allocated to WiMAX within the next five years." That's another uncertainty for license bidders now, though it might allow Andrea Rodriguez's dream to be realized later.