WiMAX at age 10: Its accomplishments and its failures

In 2005, the WiMAX Forum had big ambitions. What started out as an IEEE standard for wide area wireless connectivity was being positioned as the mobile data technology of the future, well ahead of any 3G or future 4G standard. Led by Intel and a group of upstart global carriers, WiMAX was supposed to create an Internet without wires and give birth to a new class of competitive carriers focusing on mobile IP broadband rather than voice.

That dream failed to materialize. Mobile standards bodies fast-tracked long-term evolution (LTE), which quickly became the technology of choice for traditional wireless operators the world over. Many of WiMAX’s marquee carriers were slow to launch, squandering their time to market advantage. Several of WiMAX’s early champions have decided to throw in the towel and pursue long-term evolution (CP: WiMAX’s commitment problem). And WiMAX’s biggest champion, Clearwire, is expected to announce a network sharing deal with parent company Sprint that would kick off its conversion to LTE (CP: Are we witnessing the resurgence of Sprint).

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the WiMAX Forum’s founding. When WiMAX is compared side by the side with LTE, there’s no doubt that LTE won the war, said Mo Shakouri, corporate vice president, innovation and marketing for Alvarion and vice president of the WiMAX Forum. But what’s often lost in that big LTE debate is that WiMAX still accomplished many of its goals, Shakouri said. The Forum may not have succeeded in turning WiMAX into the de facto mobile broadband technology for mobile operators, but it did succeed in creating that competitive class operator, he said. In fact those operators number 580 around the world. The vast majority of them of are small operators focusing on a few markets or rural areas, offering DSL replacement services, but several of them have plans for nationwide coverage in the world’s largest countries.

“Even if that [bigger] dream didn’t come true, that doesn’t mean WiMAX wasn’t successful,” Shakouri said. “WiMAX is no longer a competing technology to LTE or mobile operators. It’s become a complimentary one.”
Though a handful of mobile operators like Sprint are pairing WiMAX with their phones, the Forum and most of its membership has given up on the idea that WiMAX will be the data network counterpart to traditional mobile voice services, Shakouri said. Rather WiMAX is now focused on pure broadband connectivity. Of the 400 embedded WiMAX devices now on the market, just 12 are handsets. The rest are home gateway modems serving WiMAX’s growing primary fixed broadband space, M2M modules, USB modems, embedded laptops and even a few tablets, Shakouri said.

The business model for WiMAX operators is now separate from that of the mobile operators, though there is still some overlap. Most WiMAX operators are focused on purely data-driven business models, which have a completely different set of economics than traditional voice-centered models, Shakouri said. WiMAX is exploding in developing markets where huge swathes of the local population has never had access to broadband, wireless or wired. It’s become a DSL replacement technology in rural markets in the developed world. WiMAX operators are branching into telematics and machine-to-machine communications where, unlike 3G and LTE technologies, WiMAX is unhindered by SIM cards and authentication requirements. Where operators are offering mobile networks, WiMAX is being used for emerging device connectivity, providing unwired broadband access to laptops and other mobile computers, often through mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) relationships with the manufacturer to retailer, Shakouri said.

According to the Forum, WiMAX now has 17.2 million subscribers globally, with a subscriber being anything from a primary residential Internet connection to a remote largely inactive M2M link. Though much attention has been paid to LTE, there are only 1 million LTE connections in the world today from only a handful of operators.

Ironically it’s the mobile segment in WiMAX that’s growing most quickly (CP: WiMAX’s fixed user base shifting to mobile). Fixed broadband access still accounts for the majority of connections, but a few big name mobile-focused operators like Clearwire and UQ Communications have ramped up their operations in the last year, bringing millions of new mobile WiMAX subscribers on board. The Forum expects that growth to continue until mobile users are the majority of WiMAX subscribers.

Despite that growth, Shakouri said he doesn’t expect WiMAX to make a new challenge to the established mobile order, reviving the dreams of the past. Rather, he expects WiMAX to stick to the business models and markets it has established itself within in the last few years, but it will begin augmenting what were formerly grounded services with mobility.