FAST FORWARD

AT&T is testing WiMAX technology in trials in New Jersey, Georgia and Alaska. At the recent WiMAX World conference, Telephony Editor-in-Chief Jason Meyers talked to Sandy Brown, AT&T's vice president of product management, about the perception of WiMAX, the purpose of the trials and how the technology could be applied.

On comparing WiMAX to other technologies: Wi-Fi is unlicensed and hard to manage, even in a mesh architecture. It's hard for me to imagine that's going to be the right solution. The evidence to date is that WiMAX is complementary with 3G. Depending on the location and the specific requirements of the application, different technologies work. The magic of access is that it doesn't have to be one-size-fits-all. It all comes down to what the customer does. It's like watching the free market at work.

On evaluating WiMAX in trials: We got into this to attack the access problem and to see if WiMAX meets its promise on price, performance, resiliency, backup and connectivity. The critical success factors for WiMAX come down to customer adoption (do customers like the service?) and the practical operating readiness (how good is this over a given area?). Then it's about the cost and pain factors: the cost of [customer premises equipment], the cost of qualifying sites and the cost of installing CPE and designing for simple self-installation.

On WiMAX applications: Whenever you have a new technology, people start inventing what they can do with it. Financial companies might use it to set up kiosks at a college or insurance companies might use it to handle settlement and claims at a disaster site. Construction companies that don't really have an address at a construction site could use it as an access alternative. It might be used for broadcast-like applications, either cached or real-time. There's this long list of things people could do. It's about the application value that can be created.