Wibro

Designed and integrated by the Korean telecom industry as an answer to the drawbacks of speed curbs in the likes of CDMA 1x mobile phones and to increase the flow rate of broadband Internet like the ADSL or Wireless LAN, the technology uses TDD for duplexing, OFDMA for multiple access and 8.75MHz as a channel bandwidth.

As the wibro base stations, provides a dataflow rate of 30 to 50 Mbit/s and also allow the usage of portable internet with in arrange of 1 – 5 Km, obviously the data flow rate, of devices in motion can be in a range of 120 km/hr and about 250 km/hr for wireless lan’s having a slow speed and for mobile phones. This figures were actually higher when compared with the range and bandwidth it offered during the testing of this technology in connection with the APEC summit in Busan in 2005. The main advantage this technology has over the WIMAX standard is its Quality of service (QoS). This QoS gives more reliability for the streaming video content and for other loss-sensitive data. WiBro is quite demanding, in its needs varying from the spectrum use to equipment design, WiMAX leaves much of this up to the equipment provider while supplying enough information to confirm the interoperability between designs.

In Korea, the government by 2001 recognized the advent of this innovative technology by giving a 100 MHz of electromagnetic spectrum in the 2.3 - 2.4 GHz band. By the end of 2004, WiBro Phase 1 was standardized by the TTA of Korea and in late 2005, ITU reflected WiBro as IEEE 802.16e. By June 2006, two major telecom companies in Korea namely the KT and the SKT Two Korean Telco (KT, SKT) began the commercial operations in the country, starting with a charge rate of 30 US$.

Since then, many telecom giants around the world namely the TI (Italia), TVA (Brazil), Omnivision (Venezuela), PORTUS (Croatia), and Arialink (Michigan) have started plans to come out with the commercial operations of the technology.