Tipped by the independent 2/01/2004

........."And so to our traditional "wild card". Pipex Communications, formerly known as GX Networks, is a telecoms company created by one of the entrepreneurs behind Ukbetting, Peter Dubens. It has been assembled from six smaller players. The ambitious company is generating cash for the first time but is still not widely followed in the City. It could be an undiscovered gem".

Stratford-on-Avon joins the WiMax world
Voice over WiMax comes to the Midlands

By Jo Best - Silicon.com

Published: Wednesday 24 August 2005

Another area of the UK is set to get a taste of WiMax this year - the Midlands will be the next region to trial the long-range wireless broadband technology, it has emerged.

The six-month pilot will be run by ISP Pipex with kit from Airspan in Stratford-on-Avon. The pair are hoping the experiment will give them a better idea of which services and equipment work best with WiMax connectivity.

The trial will be broken down into two phases. The first phase will see the companies carrying out technical service tests, the second will involve 20 to 50 users undertaking residential trials of the WiMax service.

The two companies will also be using the trial to examine consumer reaction to the WiMax technology. Users will be expected to install their own modem and will be able to route their voice calls over the WiMax connection.

Should all go to plan with the Stratford-on-Avon project, Pipex and Airspan will start to look at new uses for WiMax, including using the technology with laptop data cards and landline and mobile handsets. An Airspan spokesman said no timeframe is set for the next phase of the project.

The Midlands rollout will create the second WiMax network in England. The first, set up by Telabria, was piloted in the Canterbury area earlier this year.

Telabria announced today that the company has secured more than 1m of funding, which the company will use to expand its WiMax offerings for southeast England.

Checked out the article Niels...

I have issue with this line at the end...

"I think the key issue there is for WiMax to rationalize itself with cellular standards somehow, and I think if that works out it will be fairly big," Crupi says."

Disagree....once we have "IP in the Air" so to speak then the is one standard....IP...IP for voice and IP for Data. SO..?

Also....us humans want ever increasing amounts of information where we are at any time.....so....WiMax is the answer is it not?.......I don't care about Intel and all the others we need to keep focused on what it means for Pipex in providing the ISP aspects. i.e. cost effective, 100% reliable, flexible connectivity.
With Telebria and Pipex head to head testing WiMax in the UK...then its who gets there first with the QOS and gets the customers signing up.

Who will sign up......I'm at the fron of the queue. :-)

Now lets dream of the future...
I'm sitting in my car and I want to access the internet as I would at home.
I flick down a 7" LCD, pull out a bluetooth tiny keyboard and access Internet Browser to surf at instanenous speeds.

OR

I have a handheld and I'm sitting in the middle of London lost.. I simply bring up a map of London and with GPS enabled helps me...

OR

I wish to catch up on email, my intranet, remote access to my business, home etc...all from laptop, handheld or other device....but with little or NO latency.

Not only that what about Sykpe! All communication methods coming over one standard.

Bandwidth is everything right now and the future. Most other european countries have 6 and 8 MB to homes and business and greater.

The UK needs to get on with it!

Views?

To add:

Timeline for us as investors....well....perhaps 1 year of testing and another year for revenue to hit the bottom line.....what do you think?

You'll have pulled into a lay-by of course.

Andrew, yes the more I look the better it gets. I just don't want to wear blinkers like the YOO guys. :)

Airspan is a $5 company on the Nasdaq so hopefully they are a good company to get into bed with. Not had much to do with their products.

What do we know of Telebria, are they a thorn where Pipex are concerned?

If there are only 2 licences...how many forthcoming?

Whats BT and C&W up to?

I very keen to see next set of annual accounts. This stock will be a steady up and onwards and may well be a 2 to 3 yearer!

Someone selling?

10m dumped

more to come?

thought it was only worth about half a % of total shares on issue.

Found this recent talk by Otellini from Intel:

Video on WiMax and Intel plans

Now, does any of you know if the Pipex license allows for "cell handover"?

Another 11m dumped.

Looks like it may have been a buy. the price dropped. Interesting?

Results due soon

yep, 8th sept results day. i'm out for the time being tho. will read the results on thurs and see.

Very interesting

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/30/pipex_wimax_trial/

Good article Troy. Well spotted.

I just think its up to Pipex in getting a useable product out as soon as!

Will wimax compete with what the cellular people will provide or will it replace it???
Maybe thats why the mobile phone carriers are being aggressive defensive over Wimax rollouts and looking perhaps at ensuring WiMax is used in a bandwidth which is not so good. Not sure if I fully understanding the technologies being used here.

However, Independent comment points at this WiMax stuff being good to excellent for Pipex.

The key question here is "cell handover"; this is not permitted in some European licenses making WiMax a non starter as a competition to truly mobile devices in Germany and France. There's also the minor problem that it only works at less than 100 Km/h.

Niels...

Is that speed your referring to or celluar coverage?

I think you write about "Cell Handover" for true nomadic connectivity.
How do we find that out for sure?

Andrew, it's the maximum speed you can move at without breaking the signal. Yes, "cell handover" is the ability to switch seamlessly from one cell to another, essential for true mobility. I don't know how we find out, perhaps someone here can help?

Just a few extracts from my reading session this morning....look at the two links at the bottom....good background info and may help. 3G -v- WiMax....then theres the next generation....802.20 and 802.22 ??? godsake!

Neils....I think the answer of "cell handover" is in these articles. The standard caters for 'line of sight' and 'non line of sight'. Not totally clear about what speed you will be able to travel at and get good connectivity. In vehicle capabilities is only one piece of the jigsaw.

Mobile WiMax moves customers and dollars from expensive cellular networks to less expensive but more diverse and widespreadand possibly overlapping and competitivenetworks operated by large and small firms alike. The diversity and extend of the deployment to come puts Intel into the supplier catbird seat. They are trying to become the dominant force in mobile WiMax

WiMax has a huge array of benefits for carriers that want to roll out WiMax in the same way they deployed DSL: few truckrolls (because of good non line of sight protocols) and lots of ratcheting in bandwidth offered to provide discrete services that mimic DSL and cable modems. These benefits are more appealing to carriers that are trying to integrate broadband wireless into an existing portfolio. These carriers are also in a better position to bundle applications on top of WiMax thus making it more reasonable for them to eat or subsidize a $500 CPE cost than even a large regional ISP or municipality.

The article also walks through mobile WiMax, which hasnt been finalized yet and is possibly due in late 2006. The Economist points out Intels previous failures to deliver on anything like a timetable, so 2007 might be optimistic, still.

I admit that I like the idea of mobile WiMax, but I have a hard time believing that it will seem like a good idea when its actually ready to be deployed. With the increase in speed and sophisticated of systems based on or parallel to Wi-Fi and 3G cellular, its just hard to see mobile WiMaxs place in that ecosystem by the time 2007 rolls around. [link via

802.16e, due to be finalized in October 2005, adds hand-off capability, thereby supporting portability and mobility. Operating in the 2-11GHz range, it is designed for point-to-multipoint applications and does not require LOS.

Where LOS can be achieved, WiMAX cell coverage can as much as 50 km (31 miles). Under NLOS conditions, the typical cell radius might be in the range of 8 km (5 miles). The fixed wireless standards provide for shared bandwidth up to about 70 Mbps per BS. The level of actual throughput depends on LOS, distance, air quality, interference and other factors that can affect signal quality. Mobile network deployments (802.16e) can be expected to provide up to 15 Mbps of shared bandwidth within a cell radius of up to three kilometers.

http://www.commweb.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=166403898

http://www.3g.co.uk/PR/August2004/8196.htm