Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Feb. 17, 2010

For the past two days now, wireless carriers, mobile handset makers and just about any company that is directly or even indirectly engaged in the field of mobile and wireless communications have gathered in Barcelona, Spain for the GSMA's 2nd annual conference. The theme this year is "2010: WiMAX is mass market".

The conference also comes on the heels of the show's organizers, the GSMA, commenting that WiMAX and LTE would never be a mainstream technology option in the market. As you might expect, not all conference attendees agree with that statement...

To this date, many of the largest wireless carriers in the U.S. including AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel have already invested large sums of capital to make WiMax and LTE technology the mainstay for at least the next ten years.

Sriram Viswanathan, vice president of Intel's Architecture Group and general manager of the WiMAX Program Office at Intel says “we are entering the second phase of WiMAX, where networks are getting ready to scale. We will be approaching one billion users covered with WiMAX signals around the world.”

Despite its intense interest in supporting the WiMAX standard, Viswanathan noted the company was not blindly tied to the technology standard. What Viswanathan was actually hinting to was LTE technology.

While not confirming Viswanathan's numbers exactly, wireless analysts at Maravedis Inc. did release some numbers during the MWC event showing that WiMAX subscribers globally had topped about 4.7 million at the end of the third quarter of last year and that those using the technology's mobile standard had surpassed those using the fixed version.

Not everyone agrees with these numbers, however.

“We are not to a point that we are blindsided about other technologies,” Viswanathan said. “When there is scale we will look at other technologies. We think WiMAX still has a two-year advantage at the silicon level over LTE, but we will look at LTE when it matures, and I have a feeling it will mature faster than some analysts seem to think.”

The conference then alluded to a handful of wireless carriers representing several regions of the world that are currently using WiMAX technology to serve their wireless customers. While many of the stories on how and why the technology was deployed differed, the consistent message from nearly all of the participants was that WiMAX was providing high-speed wireless data services now and at a very compelling cost.

In a few cases, mobile service operators said those offerings include flat-rate, unlimited offerings that are not available from traditional 3G carriers. That would be true especially in the case of U.S. wireless carriers.

Viswanathan then added that the coexistence of LTE and WiMAX technologies wasn't out of the question referencing the current existence of both GSM-based and CDMA-based networks.

He noted that about 84.8 percent of WiMAX operators were offering unlimited data packages to their users compared with about 40 percent of 3G network operators.

One of those wireless carriers that spoke at the event was Comcast, whose executive vice president Tom Nagel said the company was very positive on its WiMAX offering. Comcast's wireless data service runs on Clearwire's expanding WiMAX network as well as Sprint Nextel's CDMA network.

Nagel noted that in the initial markets where Comcast is offering both cable Internet service and the mobile offering, about 39.6 percent of consumers signing up for fixed services were also taking the wireless option.

Nagel added “we've had a very positive experience so far. Comcast feels that it's very natural in working with the high speed products that we have.”

“We think we are at the forefront of broadband adoption,” Nagel added. Not surprisingly Sprint Nextel's 4G president Matthew Carter offered similar accolades for the technology that is the basis for its advertising claims of offering the only 4G network in the U.S.

Carter also explained that for wireless users, the promise of WiMAX is something that needs to be shown, but without providing any specifics.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Source: WNT.