WiMAX World: WiMAX Roundtable Looks for Catalyst

Berge Ayvazian, chief strategy officer at Yankee Group, led a discussion at WiMax World today on the ecosystem requirements that will help WiMax technology gain traction, the biggest of which is a commitment to open architectures.

Hwan Chung, senior vice president of Samsung America; Karim El Neggar, vice president of the WiMax product group at Alcatel-Lucent; Atish Gude, senior vice president of mobile broadband operations of Sprint–Nextel’s XOHM Business Unit; Majed Sifri, CEO of Redline Communications and Sue Spradley, president of Nokia Siemens Networks North America, joined in the discussion.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Neggar said WiMAX is clearly one of the high growth areas from a business standpoint. “As a wireless infrastructure provider, there is no other choice than to be best-in-class in WiMax if you want to be best-in-class in wireless.”

But if WiMAX is to realize its potential, vendors and service providers must be on the same page. Samsung’s Chung said when it comes to interoperability with new technology, the most difficult part is how to understand the standards in a collaborative way. He said Sprint did a great thing this week in publishing it’s a paper describing its XOHM network architecture.

“By sharing, interoperability will come sooner,” Chung said.

It also will come autonomously, he said, if people begin to promote the services environment rather than the technology.

Redline’s Sifri, who said that in emerging markets where the infrastructure is in bad shape that WiMax will be phenomenally important for delivering broadband, also said interoperability is being helped along by the industry’s commitment to the certification process. Of the 67 or so certified WiMax products in the market, his company boasts six or seven.

This week, the WiMAX Forum said that since June, 13 additional devices have been awarded the WiMAX Forum Certified status in the 2.5 GHz frequency band, including four base stations and nine subscriber stations from Alcatel-Lucent, GCT Semiconductors, Huawei Technologies, Motorola, NEC, POSDATA, Redline Communications, Samsung, Telsima and ZTE Corporation.

“As a sector, we have been a bit later than we would have liked, but with interoperability it is picking up steam and that will make all the difference,” Sifri said.

Spradley said she supports XOHM’s challenge that makes it a requirement to be part of an ecosystem. She said the commitment is there to create an open architecture, but that the challenging part is in operations support systems where openness gets more complicated.

Spradley also said that openness and interoperability are a two-way street and that historically, operators have wanted special capabilities that eventually become proprietary. “Everyone has to understand that in WiMax, [openness] is its role.”

Therefore, the ecosystem is of utmost importance, said Sprint’s Gude. “We could not have done what we did this week or in the future without our entire ecosystem. Lots of credit goes there,” he said.

He added that ecosystem partners have to take a customer view and agree on what problem they are all trying to solve. “Around the world people are trying to solve different problems, and none of them are wrong,” Gude said. “But I believe ecosystems collectively need to recognize what problem we are solving for our customer and work back from there. And I encourage all forums to focus on sharing business models, because eventually that is what the ecosystem has to build to.”

Spradley said that WiMAX also provides more opportunity for managed network services, especially full network services rather than managing piece parts of the network. With more than 160 managed services contracts around the world, Nokia Siemens Networks has learned, however, that these types of contracts must be mutually beneficial.

“One thing that will hurt this industry is if both sides don’t see the benefits,” she said. The key is that we all come out profitable in the end. That worries me a little in today’s market.”

Gude said there has to be a catalyst for WiMAX. He thinks it will come from government and other large industries looking for an and-to-end solution. But Yankee’s Ayvazian is still looking for a tipping point.

“We go to [the Consumer Electronics Show] and pound on the table for devices that are mobile enabled, but we still see the chicken and egg problem. What will be the tipping point?” Ayvazian said.

Chung said it’s coming soon. “It is difficult to describe the tipping point. But when we first saw WiFi in 2000, it took two years before [we saw] fully embedded WiFi in laptops. Mobile computing was not prevalent at that time. But now I think we are seeing lots of different models of WiMAX devices. The tipping point will come sooner than it did with WiFi,” he said.

As to which devices will be the catalyst, Gude thinks the answer will come from small, innovative device players and that “the big guys” are happy to let them come in and drive the market initially. “The big guys don’t want to take the risk,” he said.

Others think the network will provide the catalyst. New innovators have nothing to innovate for with a deployed network. “When there is enough capacity in the networks, WiMAX will grow,” Neggar said. “Deploying a lot of capacity will create growth at the chip level and then the ecosystem will get here. So 4G will be a success if we see 3G grow in capacity. Our role is to help that happen. We work actively on the consumer electronics side for what will happen in two years, but we have an immediate need to provide capacity for applications today that will grow traffic on the networks.”

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines