Garth Freeman, the CEO of Australian service provider Buzz Broadband, caused a stir last week when he openly disparaged WiMAX performance at a conference in Thailand.
Freeman reportedly said that the 802.16d WiMAX kit used by Buzz, an Australian local carrier and ISP, had been a "disaster".
More specifically, he said that NLOS (non line of sight) performance was "non-existent" beyond 2km from the base station and latency rates were as high as 1,000ms. This would make VoIP, a central plank of Buzz's service strategy, virtually unusable.
But Airspan, Buzz Broadband's supplier of WiMAX base stations and CPE kit in the licensed 3.4GHz band, has hit back at Freeman. In a statement attributed to Declan Byrne, Airspan's CMO, the performance shortcomings reported by Freeman are laid squarely at the door of Buzz.
"With regard to range, although Airspan offers both micro-cell and macro-cell base station solutions, Buzz Broadband opted to go with the less-expensive micro-cell base stations in order to reduce cost," said Byrne.
In responding to Freeman's complaints about high latency times, Byrne turned the spotlight away from Airspan kit and onto Buzz Broadband's network. "We know that there were significant under-provisioning issues in the core network which connected the Airspan equipment to the internet," Byrne's statement read. "Very early in the relationship, Airspan technical services determined that Buzz's backhaul network was considerably under-dimensioned (again to save cost) and lacked sufficient QoS, and that these factors were the direct cause of VoIP quality issues in the network."
Airspan claims that it even went so far as to offer funding for third-party analysis "to help Buzz understand these issues". Freeman rejected this offer.
Ahead of Freeman's outburst, Buzz is known to have only made a limited deployment of fixed WiMAX to around 200 users.
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