Axiom, Freedom4 argue for UK-wide WiMAX

Freedom4, the go-to-market brand chosen last month by U.K.-based Pipex Wireless, will give users freedom from restricted wireless access. Two weeks ago, the company chose Axiom Systems as the operations support system that would free its WiMAX service from manual service provisioning. And this week the companies jointly presented to the TM Forum’s Management World Americas audience their argument for making a national WiMAX network a reality.

They were talking of the smaller nation across the pond, but still a laudable effort to demonstrate the applicability of WiMAX technology across a wide and diverse geography. Freedom4, which has WiMAX proponent Intel as an investor, began with a city-wide effort in Manchester. Tim Flinders, head of systems architecture at Freedom4, along with Brian Naughton, vice president of architecture and strategy for Axiom, presented a picture of the operational challenges and benefits of becoming the first commercial provider of WiMAX services in the U.K.

“The whole business plan is about mobility. We are an end-to-end value proposition,” Flinders said. “And we are completely greenfield, so that in itself can be a challenge.”

Freedom4’s challenges were turning existing broadband service components into a WiMAX network. Since this was a unique scenario, the company saw value in Axiom’s AXIOSS software suite because it takes a modular approach to service creation and fulfillment that lets users break the software into blocks and re-assemble them to fit their particular needs.

Manchester is the sixth largest city in the U.K. It has a population of approximately 450,000. Freedom4 plans to expand WiMAX coverage to 50 urban markets by 2009. Freedom4 provides wireless services with symmetrical upload and download speeds of up to 8 Mb/s. It is a wholesale provider to other broadband service providers.

AXIOSS is an end-to-end service provisioning and fulfillment platform that includes modules for order-to-service management, service inventory, service activation and a service dashboard for inter-module control.

“Inventory is important to us,” Flinders said. “Not a lot of companies that have capabilities in this are with WiMAX.”