Beyond certification

Q & A:

NAME: Ron Resnick

TITLE: President

GROUP: WiMAX Forum

This year, the work of the WiMAX Forum will be apparent in the first commercial Mobile WiMAX deployments and the ongoing market evolution of Fixed WiMAX. Ron Resnick, president of the WiMAX Forum, recently spoke to Telephony's Editor-in-Chief Dan O'Shea about the forum's efforts.

On the WiMAX Forum's current certification schedule for Mobile WiMAX gear:

We're shooting for the first half of the year for the completion of Wave 1. Where [multiple input/multiple output] gets involved in Wave 2, we are looking at the later part of the second half of this year, in Q4. There is massive effort to make that happen, lots of pressure by the operators. Will that be done? I don't have any report in front of me that says it can't be done.

On the forum's roaming initiative and importance of global roaming:

It's such a critical component to assure that wherever a person is that WiMAX can be a global platform for reaching the mobile Internet, and in order to have the happen, global roaming has to be in place. There's areas — technical as well as business-oriented — that the WiMAX Forum can get involved in to help ensure that wholesale billing, clearing and financial settlement are managed appropriately, as well as all the connections you need for AAA [servers] for roaming, and to ensure that all the carrier are using the same financial data format. A user-friendly roaming service has to be available globally; it has to be clean operationally; and the contractual model requires minimal up-front investment from all the operators. And it has to be capable of enhancing all the value-added services. Right now, we're looking at the business model for what the forum would do, and we're writing the technical specifications. We're also looking at putting together a roaming template to facilitate for the smaller providers. Probably in the second half of 2007, we'll have a level of roaming capability that we can begin making available.

We're not trying to reinvent the wheel. Cibernet [which administers 3G roaming] is the chair of our roaming working group, and we're using best-known practices to do this. It's the sort of thing where all I have to do is mention roaming, and service providers say, “Absolutely, I'm interested.”

On an approach to WiMAX in Taiwan:

Taiwan is where 95% of Wi-Fi products are made. From a countrywide perspective as well as for the ecosystem, that you have such a commanding presence there in the notebook business and Wi-Fi, it's very logical for Taiwan and all the OEMs there to jump on the WiMAX bandwagon. Taiwan wants to use WiMAX as a key step in delivering digital convergence. They will build two labs there, and they want to collaborate with us on international standards. It's actually the cabinet of the Taiwanese government that's driving. To show you how far ahead these guys are, they [published a blueprint titled, “Taiwan's WiMAX National Acceleration Program”] in August of 2005. The M-Taiwan project is getting an investment of $210 million from the government alone. On top of that, they're investing $30 million to ensure that chipsets, CPE, base stations are being manufactured. In July 2007, they'll release spectrum in the 2.5 GHz range, and by 2008, they project they'll have 814 WiMAX base stations and want interoperability for WiMAX/Wi-Fi. Taiwan is going to be a showplace for WiMAX.