Mobile WiMAX: The evolution begins

The telecom industry is at one of those richly interesting points in its history where many different types of migration seem to be happening at the same time. In the service provider back office, there is the migration to the era of customer self-maintenance, in which automated network management and remote self-service capabilities are changing how broadband service is activated and administered. In the network core, carriers are migrating to IP multimedia subsystem architectures that are simplifying how different types of communications traffic are treated, creating a more structurally open and operationally efficient network environment. And at the access level, carriers are continuing to migrate to new forms of broadband access, Fixed WiMAX being among the latest.

Yet, in the broadband access realm, there is more soon on the way, as the WiMAX Forum and its member companies look to make Mobile WiMAX, based on the IEEE 802.16e standard, a commercial endeavor by sometime early next year. And many people in the WiMAX community are betting that Mobile WiMAX will do what Fixed WiMAX and other fixed forms of broadband access have not been able to do — inspire a whole new way of thinking about and defining broadband service a the broadband user experience.

“If you are talking about a technology that can turn wireless into a broadband phenomenon, it is clearly Mobile WiMAX that you are talking about,” said Sai Subramanian, vice president of product management for Navini Networks.

For the last year or more, long before the IEEE ratified the 802.16e standard on which Mobile WiMAX is based in December 2005, Subramanian and many other people in the WiMAX Forum and in the industry were calling Mobile WiMAx by another name: personal broadband. That name isn't so much an alter ego, as it is a much better descriptor of what the technology actually provides to its users, as well as an indicator of exactly how it may change our current concept of broadband technology and access.

“Mobile WiMAX will broaden the market for broadband everywhere in the world and make it the kind of market that it should be, one that is counted in number of people connected rather than in the number of households connected,” Subramanian said.

Carlton O'Neal, vice president of marketing for Alvarion, added, “Beginning this year, there will be a move to the idea of personal broadband, and it can change broadband in the same way that [personal communications services] changed the cell phone market. What will happen with Mobile WiMAX is that you will have a personal broadband service that is wrapped in a device. The concept of broadband will go up a notch and become disconnected from location. People will be asking each other, ‘Who is your personal broadband provider?’”