Inside the world of WiMAX

The first generation of WiMAX equipment is in the midst of the initial stages of WiMAX Forum certification testing in the Cetecom test labs in Malaga, Spain. Ron Resnick, president of the WiMAX Forum, talked to Telephony about the testing process, shifting market dynamics and the future of WiMAX technology.

In July of 2005, the Cetecom lab opened for business. That doesn't mean that products immediately go into the lab and certification happens the next month. It takes a few months once the lab opens to work through all the abstract test suites and test scripts. During that time, the lab also gets reservations for products to be submitted and defines the specifics of the test to verify the WiMAX Forum-defined profiles we'll look at first, which is time division duplexing in the 3.5 GHz spectrum.

In the interoperability testing process, some parts of the activity are proprietary, even to members of the WiMAX Forum — particularly the question of who submitted products for testing. It's the obligation of the WiMAX Forum to not disclose who's in the labs, but that doesn't preclude any company that may be aggressively selling their own products to go out on their own and say they've submitted products. Certain companies may not want to announce that, and others may — it all deals with selling strategy.

Within the industry itself, that kind of communication probably doesn't have an impact, because those companies are calling on their accounts anyway and those accounts are going to want to see product. From an external viewpoint it could possibly create some confusion. In the investment community, the potential of WiMAX is still open because products aren't shipped yet. The upside I believe you'll see in the marketplace isn't going to happen until later in Q4, so certain companies may feel the need to demonstrate to the investment community that their products are on schedule and being submitted to Cetecom.

The WiMAX Forum has more than 350 members, including 120 operators, and our membership is growing. We send out newsletters and other communication about where we are with regard to certification, so our members know. There are 150 scheduled or actual deployments, and about 30% of those are true commercial deployments of pre-WiMAX gear — products the operators are sure will be certified.

If you look at the timeline for 3G certification, we're far faster. The way we've organized the WiMAX Forum as a collective of companies allows for accelerated progress. I haven't had any complaints about delays from operators in the WiMAX Forum.

We'll have a public plugfest in the first week of November, a week prior to our next global plenary session. We'll also have demos at the plenary session in Beijing in November, and 15 companies have committed to showing product. That means products exist that will conform to the WiMAX Forum's certification process.

Certification is an evolving process, and this is just the first iteration. What we're certifying interoperability for by the end of this year is the outdoor air interface protocol. In 2006, we start looking higher up in the stack. We'll add more and more tests to the certification process to ensure that WiMAX supports quality of service and all future services. All products will need to conform to that, and companies know that as their products evolve, they'll need to continue to work through this process.

The way WiMAX will be successful — particularly mobile WiMAX — in the data domain is if it delivers an end-to-end solution as good as what 3G is doing. The WiMAX Forum has sent a response to the European Commission for consideration of WiMAX as a technology to be compatible to UMTS in the 3GPP. It's a challenging issue, and the biggest challenge is to make the regulatory bodies and governments aware that this will allow a collection of technologies of choice that would lower the cost of the CPE and the architecture and provide a global platform.

Even when these companies are competing there's very strong cooperation, and I believe that's going to continue. The size of this personal broadband market is so big that it's in everyone's best interest to generate excitement about the overall notion of broadband wireless.