The next step for WiMAX

About 400 people from WiMAX Forum member companies are meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, this week at the group's quarterly members meeting. The meeting comes just as WiMAX product certification testing is supposed to be starting at Cetecom Laboratories in Malaga, Spain. But don't expect much of the talk coming out of Vancouver to be about product certification, tests and standards.

That's pretty much what the WiMAX Forum has been talking about for the last two and a half years, and during that time, the group got a lot of criticism for not talking more about the market for WiMAX--what applications it would be used for, how to quantify the market opportunity, how carriers under different kinds of regulatory and competitive arenas around the world would deploy it, and how to position and label it in a broadband market that offers plenty of technology options already.

With the Vancouver meeting, an upcoming meeting this fall in China and other activities to come, the forum is unmistakably moving from an engineering phase into a market phase. It's taking part in market research activities, making a concerted effort to relate to the service providers and vendors in parts of the world where WiMAX could make its earliest impact, and is focusing on how to best position WiMAX in a broader broadband market. That includes work on how to position solutions based on 802.16e, the portable, nomadic version of the 802.16 standard.

Looking back, it was easy to criticize the forum as a bunch of people in love with technology who hadn't figured out the real market potential for it. Though we may still have questions about how big that market will be, service providers are getting more interested and starting to make definitive deployment plans. From this perspective, it seems like the forum was doing things in a pretty logical manner.

New technologies can suffer from too much hype, but it's also important to remember that hype is part of the process. Innovation gets all of us excited, and often it does so before it can provide answers for all our questions. But those questions are always answered eventually, in due time.

E-mail me at doshea@primediabusiness.com.