Better broadband

The coming of spring is all about renewal, and every spring for the last four years, we've produced “Telephony's Guide to WiMAX” with the intent to gauge the progress of the budding WiMAX technology ecosystem. At some points, it may have seemed more like repetition than renewal, as the early years of the technology and the WiMAX Forum's interoperability certification efforts were fraught with delays and criticisms of WiMAX's market potential.

During the first three years, we spent a lot of time in the industry — and a lot of space in this supplement — talking about certification schedules, plugfests, testing waves, the capabilities of particular products and the overall importance of interoperability to the future market success of WiMAX. We also spent a lot of time on prefixes and suffixes, trying to determine which products were “pre-WiMAX,” which were “WiMAX-ready” and which were “WiMAX Certified.”

Not that certification isn't important to the broader availability and deployment of WiMAX, but it's time to move beyond that. The much bigger stories are 1) who among service providers is deploying broadband wireless; 2) how their plans fit into the broader movement to fulfill a vision for personal broadband; and 3) what the industry is doing to create models for how WiMAX compliments fellow broadband solutions like Wi-Fi, DSL and even 3G to allow broadband mobility and seamless roaming on a truly global scale.

For that reason, you'll find nary a mention of certification schedules in this spring's Guide to WiMAX. Instead, we've profiled a number of carriers busy deploying the technology to meet real market needs. That list begins with Sprint. The mobile giant soothed many of the concerns surrounding the future of Mobile WiMAX when it committed last summer to testing and deploying the technology as the 4G stop on its network road map. Still, as Kevin Fitchard reports on page 4, Sprint, with the help of its three vendors, is massaging the technology to determine how it can best serve the carrier's mobile broadband ambitions. Elsewhere, we look at how several carriers worldwide each have a different take on how WiMAX is serving their needs.

Many in the WiMAX community smartly have associated their technology with a more personal — nomadic or mobile — version of existing broadband capability. Sometime in the future, the telecom industry will help us realize this ideal, but WiMAX is just one component of the vision. Rather, WiMAX and other technologies will work together to provide a more comprehensive fabric of broadband availability. “Personal” is one way of putting it, but just saying “better“ also suffices. So, herein lies a progress report on efforts to provide better broadband, a mission worth renewing every spring until we get there.