WCA DISPLAYS VoIP PROGRESS; WiMAX FORUM MEETING UP NEXT

For a mid-summer event in steamy Washington, D.C., WCA 2005, held two weeks ago, seemed to capture the attention of the entire broadband wireless sector, providing a stage for several announcements of service provider deployments and trials. It also acted as a warm-up session for the next stop on the sector's event tour — this week's WiMAX Forum quarterly members meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia.

That WiMAX Forum meeting will feature application demonstrations involving Microsoft, Disney and other luminaries and will signal the trade group's definitive departure from WiMAX's pre-market technology certification phase, said Mo Shakouri, vice president of marketing for the WiMAX Forum.

WiMAX product certification testing is just beginning this month, but Shakouri said the group already is focusing more on issues such as how WiMAX fits into the overall broadband picture and what kind of market opportunity is presented by 802.16e, the mobility standard nearing IEEE approval.

“We're now moving away from the details of certification and into the real market issues,” Shakouri said.

In addition to the applications being demonstrated in Vancouver, Shakouri said the forum this week also would be discussing a market research study being done by the Yankee Group, and other efforts to quantify the potential market for WiMAX in China.

Meanwhile, the recent WCA 2005 conference proved that WiMAX, and broadband wireless technologies in general, are already much on the minds of service providers, as trials are being undertaken and contractual relationships forged. Among the service provider deployments announced at the show, Aperto Networks, fresh from announcing its WiMAX platform strategy last month at Supercomm 2005, said at WCA 2005 that it had landed a new carrier contract for its existing PacketWave system with IntroWeb, a service provider in Holland. IntroWeb will use the system to support voice-over-IP (VoIP) and virtual private network applications.

“VoIP is becoming a key requirement and service, and we need to make it easy for these companies to support,” said Alan Menezes, vice president of marketing at Aperto. “They really need an integrated platform with quality of service capabilities.”

VoIP, in fact, was one of the highlights of WCA, as VoIP applications software vendor BroadSoft exhibited at the event for the first time and announced that it has been making progress forging contracts with VoIP wholesalers, such as CommPartners and Ecuity Advanced Services, that are working closely with broadband wireless service providers.

Those service providers increasingly want to support VoIP but don't feel the need to be voice technology experts themselves. “In some ways, VoIP is just another application for us,” said Graham Barnes, CEO of NextWeb, a wireless ISP in the western U.S. “We're anticipating that those customers who want it will also be buying extra bandwidth from us to support it.”

SOMA Networks, another vendor of broadband wireless access equipment, said at WCA that it had completed interoperability testing with BroadSoft's applications platform.

“There's a lot of interest right now in coupling VoIP and broadband wireless,” said Thomas Flak, vice president of product strategy for SOMA Networks. “We built SIP functionality into our CPE from the very beginning. We believe you have to integrate VoIP in the wireless world to make it work. VoIP won't work on wireless just because it works on wireline.”