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The recently announced US$330 million acquisition of WiMAX specialist Navini shows Cisco's determination to increase its presence in WiMAX. But the merger is being driven by an all together bigger issue.
 According to Jonathan Hindle, Director of Mobile Service Provider Marketing with Cisco, the purchase is really about increasing the company's presence in developing and emerging markets. Hindle should know. He has been involved from the start with Cisco's growth strategy for wireless in emerging markets and is one of the principal architects of the Navini deal. "[Navini] takes the broadband penetration issue in emerging markets head on and solves it. And everything flows from there." says Hindle.
Key to this is a dramatic lowering of the cost of broadband by reducing both capital and operating costs for emerging market mobile service providers. This will enable them to offer low cost broadband to the millions of new mobile phone customers who are eager to get on the net for the first time.
Mass personal broadband
Cisco call this the mass personal market for affordable broadband. From Albania to Zimbabwe and everywhere in between people in their millions are acquiring mobile phones. That is leading to a dramatic increase in the number of cellular towers erected to support these users and their communications. And it is these towers which will play a key role in helping people get online. "In countries where towers to support cellular voice customers are being rolled out, broadband penetration as a percentage of the population is typically very low," says Hindle. "But you can just stand in one of those countries and see the towers being rolled out, see cellular voice services being rolled out, and you think 'well, that's a great place to hang wireless broadband from.' It's just such an obvious angle."
Enterprise opportunities
The new technology also offers great opportunities for many of Cisco's traditional customers in the SMB and SME markets in emerging countries. Cisco doesn't want to make the mistake of going after customers in these segments with an over-priced offering. Navini has a solution that is very simple to deploy. "You have over-the-air activation of Customer Premise Equipment (CPE). That means you can basically go over the service provider network and remotely get things up and running with a minimum of fuss." says Hindle.
Smart Beamforming
Smart Beamforming is one of the main technologies the Navini purchase gives Cisco access to. A simple way to think about this is to imagine two different ways to illuminate a darkened room, Hindle explains. You could hang a bare bulb in the middle and shine fairly dim light over a broad area with little control, or you could shine a beam from a torch in a very concentrated manner to an area that needed light in a more efficient manner. Smart Beamforming does the latter.
"This is really about trying to maximize the efficiency of deployment to try and reduce CapEx spending by reducing the number of base stations that you need to cover a specific area," says Hindle. "Beamforming is using the same amount of power to shine a torch to exactly the spot where you want so that a user has maximum bandwidth."
And what about bandwidth? Hindle says that it's not far fetched to think that WiMax could one day support applications as bandwidth hungry as Telepresence. It's an aspiration today, but could one day be a reality in the future.
MIMO
Another key technology is MIMO - multiple-input and multiple-output, which uses multiple antennas both at the transmitter and receiver to improve the performance of radio communication systems. It is a type of smart antenna which offers significant increases in data through put and link range without requiring additional bandwidth or transmission power. MIMO achieves this by higher spectral efficiency and link reliability or diversity, which reduces fading.
Integration
The acquisition is a natural fit for Cisco and will form a part of Cisco's offering to service providers right away. Both companies' systems are end to end IP and Hindle believes full technical integration can be achieved within 18-24 months. The companies seem to enjoy a close relationship and, by co-incidence, they already have adjacent offices and research centres in both the US and India.
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