Mobile WiMAX: The evolution begins

If it seems a stretch for the average communications consumer to start thinking in those terms about broadband, then maybe you just aren't young enough to know better about how the nature of communications, and by extension broadband, is already changing. Mobile substitution of landline service, the so-called act of “cutting the cord,” has been on the rise for the last few years, and mobile substitution in the U.S. market alone is expected to be around 10%. And leading the charge for mobile substitution, for the most part, is a young demographic market segment — 18 to 34-year-olds (though the trend is most intense among 18 to 25-year-olds).

“It's a younger demographic, the iPod generation,” Subramanian said. “A lot of them have never had a landline connection to their name, and you probably never will see that happen. What they are used to is mobile services, and the idea is going to a retail store and buying a phone with the service already connected to it, not buying a phone and then waiting for someone to come out to your house to connect it or to wire your house.”

Having said that, as Mobile WiMAX and the concept of personal broadband become more broadly commercially applicable over the next year or so, the kinds of applications that consumers may use personal broadband for may not be so far removed from exactly the kind of applications they use a broadband landline connection for today — Internet access, voice over IP, downloading music, sending the occasional photo. However, having the mobility while performing these tasks will be a huge change for most people. Navini's Subramanian said, “The initial applications for personal broadband will be some of the same things that you do with a wired broadband connection, and that's really no big shakes, right? It will be a matter of user preference, but the idea is also that the user can perform that task in their preferred way, at their preferred time and place.”

O'Neal added, “There will be a killer app for WiMAX, and that killer app will be whatever people are doing at that time that they are connected.”

Meanwhile, at the same time that Mobile WiMAX is emerging and personal broadband is taking shape, the nature of existing mobile service also is changing, as mobile data traffic is increasing on the 3G networks of the traditional mobile service providers, and new content-based services — not just games or, most recently, music services, but also mobile TV and other kinds of video programming. 3G networks and devices are starting to catch on to the idea that consumers want video content, and even traditional TV programming, to be capable of being removed from their living rooms and their cable TV or landline broadband connections. It is a trend that Hollywood and the rest of the community that develops and produces much of the TV and other video content we enjoy may be well ahead in understanding. The popularity of a device like the video iPod is just one example of that trend.

“The video iPod is kind of a revolution in itself,” Alvarion's O'Neal said. “That's because it is helping to shift the paradigm in the way that people are consuming entertainment. Something like that is a Mobile WiMAX application. There's a lot of store-and-forward video possibilities. There's the whole emergence now of viral videos, and that can be another killer app in the way that people will want to share things.”