The WiMAX World Conference & Exposition drew close to 1,000 people to its seminars yesterday, eager to get answers on everything from WiMAX business cases to the macro-competitive landscape and more.
Deployment cases are a central theme of the show, and of a kickoff press event last night, moderated by conference co-chair Berge Ayvazian, executive vice president and chief research officer at the Yankee Group, which has announced it joined Intel Corp.'s Digital Communities Initiative at the show. Sanford Brown, vice president of product management at AT&T Business, said during the panel that his company will use WiMAX to better serve business customers. The carrier is conducting two pre-WiMAX trials, in Millford, N.J. and Alaska, and has another one in Atlanta scheduled to kick off by the end of the year. "Access is a huge issue for us, as the main cause of service failure and a cause of long provisioning intervals," he said. "WiMAX represents resiliency and better provisioning speeds, and will be a complement to our existing fixed network." The company also plans to use WiMAX to provide mobile applications to its customer base once the 802.16e mobile WiMAX standard is gelled.
The extent of its WiMAX deployment is TBD. "We will determine during our trials how much people will pay, and how many will adopt in a geographic area," he noted. "Then we can do straightforward math to determine ROI."
Central to bolstering that ROI for the mobile standard is the cost of customer CPE, said Dan Coombes, senior vice president of wireless broadband networks and CTO of networks at Motorola Inc. "This is a key aspect of the business case for carriers," he notes. "802.16e will put 10 million chipsets in PCs, and we'll see initial testing of subscriber devices in 2007. That's where the real volume is -- 802.16e enables mobile broadband video and data-centric applications going forward. Today's cellular technologies cannot handle large amounts of data at an affordable price."
Coombes elaborated on another show theme: Where WiMAX fits into the larger wireless landscape. The always-on, all-you-can-eat "DSL on the move" nature of the technology lets users avoid paying the per-megabyte prices of cellular, making it attractive for certain applications, he noted.
Backhaul is another probable real-world use case, according to panelist Bill Beck, deputy CTO of the City of Minneapolis, which is developing plans for a citywide broadband IP access network involving fiber, Wi-Fi and WiMAX. "WiMAX will be a backhaul technology in conjunction with a low-cost access canopy provided with Wi-Fi," he said.
