In June, the MIIT recognised McWiLL (which as you know stands for Multi-carrier wireless internet local loop although it had slipped your mind for the moment), which already has seen limited deployment in China in the 1,800MHz spectrum band, as a technology that is suitable for use in the 400MHz band. The announcement gives the technology, founded as far back as 2005, some minor hopes of making it in the market place. Note minor. Indeed, very minor.
McWiLL has struggled to gain market acceptance. Its only backer seemed to be former fixed-only operator, China Netcom. This company has since been integrated into China Unicom, a full service operator with a nationwide WCDMA network which probably can be read to mean it does not need another wireless platform.
The technology has been exported to Sri Lanka, South Africa and Mongolia, and there may be as many as two million subscribers in China.
Before your read the next paragraph pour a cup of coffee and perhaps have some aspirin ready. Now read on:
McWiLL, as you well know, is a TDD-based wireless access platform that combines SCDMA (synchronous CDMA), CS-OFDM (code spreading orthogonal frequency division multiple access), MIMO and smart antennas, as well as other wireless techniques such as adaptive modulation (up to QAM64), dynamic channel allocation and make-before-break handoff, to offer a high-speed data and voice services. All these features are designed to work with any IP core network and provide up to 15Mbps of data rate using 5MHz of spectrum.
In a way, McWiLL tries to incorporate all of today’s wireless networking techniques into a single platform which is very possibly why it is almost impossible for a normal human to understand.
According to Beijing Xinwei, which owns all the intellectual property for McWiLL, all the components are in place, including base stations, access points, data cards and even handsets and remote cameras. Thus you could say it is all dressed up for the party but nowhere to go.
CommsDay reports that on the company’s industry alliances page, only 20 companies are listed, and only two, Alcatel-Lucent and HP, can be considered major players in the telecoms industry. McWon’t sadly seems like the right name.