WIRELESS:WiMAX: WORTH WATCHING

The 802.11 Wi-Fi market has boomed in recent years, thanks to the efforts of groups like the Wi-Fi Alliance to educate the market about the technology. Participants in the WiMAX Forum are hoping to successfully apply that same model to the 802.16 metropolitan area network WiMAX technology.

WiMAX will be useful both as a Wi-Fi backhaul technology and as a solution for enhancing coverage around Wi-Fi hot spots bunched in metro areas where there might be something to be gained by allowing users to roam between hot spots, such as in a distributed enterprise campus application.

The WiMAX Forum probably will not release its first product certifications until sometime next year, said Margaret LaBrecque, president of the forum and WiMAX product manager at Intel. So if you want to impress friends with prognostications about wireless, tell them 2005 will be “The Year of WiMAX.”

That expected schedule for certification and commercialization doesn't necessarily mean WiMAX will be absent from the network technology mix in the interim. LaBrecque said 802.16a products will gradually become available for testing and purchase during the next year — Redline Communications announced an 802.16a product last month.

“We're definitely pushing for carriers to engage in trials now,” LaBrecque said. “We weren't seeing interest from them in WiMAX nine months ago.”

LaBrecque said WiMAX companies expect the buyers of products to range from small wireless ISPs to mobile carriers, telcos interested in DSL extension and specialist backhaul providers. There may also be room for a wholesale model in the market, under which U.S. carriers that own MMDS spectrum at 3.5 GHz could deploy WiMAX equipment to support Wi-Fi backhaul and other services on their spectrum.