WiMAX Global Roaming: It’s Now or Never

Haven’t we seen this movie before? Nearly 70 representatives from 16 WiMAX operators and various vendors, including Clearwire, Sprint, Samsung, BSNL, Intel, LG Electronics and YTL Communications, gathered in Taipei, Taiwan last week under the auspices of the WiMAX Forum to draft international roaming agreements at the first WiMAX Forum Global Operator Summit. Everyone’s reported on it. Forgive my skepticism, but the question lingers: Is this a so-what announcement, or will the Forum actually make some headway on the issue?

"The WiMAX Forum Global Operator Summit was created to specifically address overcoming both business and consumer perceptions that data roaming is expensive, and to explore ways to help operators grow revenue," said Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum, in a statement. "The opportunity for operators to offer their customers roaming is there, and it is an excellent way for operators to add another viable revenue stream and earn returns on their 4G network investments."

Well … yes. But before we get too excited about the summit, it should be noted that operators getting together to work on global roaming agreements is not new. At all. It’s just that not much has come from previous attempts.

Commercially, WiMAX is no longer an emerging technology. Yet it still largely exists in geographical islands that can’t be reached by a handoff boat. Meanwhile, LTE rollouts are starting and WiMAX is on the brink of losing its time-to-market advantage. Industry wags have been painting it as the “alternative" 4G act to LTE’s mainstream pop diva for months now. Clearwire has had some, shall we say, funding issues. Some WiMAX operators – including Sprint – have been upfront about their willingness to pull up stakes and make for the LTE camp should that prove more commercially beneficial. I don’t feel that I’m going out on a limb here to say that going forward, worldwide roaming and GSM-like service handoff will be critical to WiMAX operators maintaining viability beyond their spectral regions.

So what’s the holdup? Way back in 2005, before the industry had even come to a consensus on how to present the word WiMAX (is it Wimax? WiMax? No, folks, it’s the much punchier, in-your-face WiMAX), remote-access aggregator RemotePipes announced the formation of the now-defunct “WiMax Global Roaming Alliance," which died a quiet, unsung death. It was perhaps too early, too visionary, for its own good. In 2006, the Australasia-focused WiMAX Spectrum Owners' Alliance (WiSOA) was set up by Unwired Australia to form a WiMAX-roaming Web globally, setting its sights on connecting 1 billion users to the technology. Perhaps finding the real world a little lonely, the WiSOA was soon folded into the Wireless Broadband Alliance, which makes WiMAX, LTE, Wi-Fi and 3G inter-roaming and handoff its raison d’etre (mainly focused on public Wi-Fi networks), and is signing up new members – Verizon, AT&T and Comcast joined just last summer. The WBA also released a new specification last year, dubbed WISPr 2.0, for providing seamless authentication between Wi-Fi networks and other broadband access networks such as GSM/UMTS/LTE and WiMAX. Last we heard, in June, trials were underway. Communications have been dark since then.

Meanwhile, in 2009, the group known as the Global Alliance Partners – Clearwire Corp. in the United States, YTL Communications of Malaysia, Wi-tribe of Pakistan, Vee Telecom of Taiwan, and Global Mobile of Taiwan – all got together and pledged to make roaming happen amongst themselves. A couple of deals were signed. But nothing in the way of a standard roaming arrangement across all partners came to fruition.

The WIMAX Forum launched its own global roaming program in 2009, which includes publication of several documents for WiMAX Forum member companies implementing roaming services, including technical specifications, a test plan, a roaming contract template and a guide to follow when implementing roaming. It’s the last, best hope for real international roaming to be achieved. Now, two years later, this  operator summit will hopefully yield some actual progress.

Some one-off roaming deals are in place today: Roaming is enabled between Sprint and Clearwire – though that’s unsurprising considering that they share a network. Sprint also has agreements with Digicell in Jamaica (and who wouldn’t want to spend time accessing the cloud from Montego Bay?) and Global Mobile in Taiwan. Clearwire Corp. has inked deals with UQ Communications in Japan and Yota in Russia – though the latter has now abandoned new WiMAX builds in favor of transitioning to LTE (partly, it should be noted, because of the inability to hand off WiMAX calls between operators within the country). Even so, such arrangements are few and far between, and, presumably, the smaller operator and country-specific nature of them is hardly getting us to that 20-percent of the population mark for WiMAX uptake.

LTE hasn’t proven out roaming either, of course, and won’t for a while. But LTE’s deployment among Tier 1 providers and incumbents, not to mention broad vendor support, will likely mean that the issue will be addressed sooner rather than later.

Making global roaming across spectrum bands and technology iterations is of course a difficult technical feat. And the business relationships must also be worked out – that’s the obvious. But this is all taking too long. The fractured efforts and potentially competing approaches to solving the roaming puzzle need some alignment, perhaps. Whatever the issue, roaming among WiMAX operators needs to happen soon, to avoid the risk of subscriber and application uptake stagnation.